Abstract

Optical phase conjugate devices utilize a variety of physical phenomena to exactly reverse the direction of propagation of an incident optical beam.. A recent survey of some of the possible optical devices is available¹. The interest in using these devices for optical logic, computation and interconnect stems from the ultrafast, subpicosecond, switching speed that optical four wave mixing (FWM) devices are able to achieve². For all optical logic network both the input and the output logic variables must be optical quantities. Four-wave mixing elements, because they require a number of optical beams for its operation, are candidates for such networks. Optical FWM logic assignments use various polarization and amplitude coding schemes to realize canonical logic, such as an AND and an OR, gate configurations^3-5.

© 1985 Optical Society of America