Abstract

The advantages of differential signaling in binary communication and logic systems are high reliability and speed; the main disadvantage is the additional hardware required. For optical interconnection network and digital optical logic systems, we describe simple hardware implementations for differential signaling and analyze their impact on the system's reliability and performance. Model non-idealities include finite contrast, shot and thermal noise, scattering, diffraction, and aberrations. In contrast to the limits of direct detection, we describe a crossbar whose size is independent of modulator contrast ratio and threshold logic circuits scalable to high fan-in.

© 1992 Optical Society of America