Abstract

This talk reviews recent progress in ultrafast, all-optical soliton-dragging and soliton-trapping logic gates. These gates satisfy all requirements for a clocked digital optical processor, have potential speeds of 0.2 Tbps, and have switching energies approaching a picojoule. Recent research incorporates erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA's) to make active switches with reduced switching energies and semiconductor waveguides to make more compact devices. In addition to lowering switching energies, the EDFA gates also relax the timing constraints on soliton gates. Fiber soliton logic gates are one example of a more general time domain chirp switch (TDCS) architecture that consists of a nonlinear chirper followed by a dispersive delay line. The key feature to this architecture is that for high bit rate short pulse applications the TDCS requires less nonlinear interaction and consequently less energy than other all-optical switches. Size reduction is obtained by substituting a semiconductor waveguide below half-gap in place of a fiber as the nonlinear chirper, thereby implementing a hybrid TDCS. This hybrid switch demonstrates the applicability of this architecture to materials other than fibers and represents the first step toward implementing a compact, integrable, all-semiconductor TDCS.

© 1992 Optical Society of America