Abstract

We demonstrate a 5.8pJ switching energy all-optical NOR-gate with a fanout of six that is based on timing shifts from soliton dragging [1] in a fiber. This three-terminal, cascadable gate satifies all requirements for a clocked digital optical processor. Furthermore, we show that soliton dragging logic gates are one embodiment in fiber form of a novel switch architecture of time domain chirp switches (TDCS). Although TDCS have a long latency, for high bit-rate applications TDCS lead to switching energies approaching one Picojoule.

© 1991 Optical Society of America