Method of developing all-optical trinary JK, D-type, and T-type flip-flops using semiconductor optical amplifiers

To meet the demand of very fast and agile optical networks, the optical processors in a network system should have a very fast execution rate, large information handling, and large information storage capacities. Multivalued logic operations and multistate optical flip-flops are the basic building blocks for such fast running optical computing and data processing systems. In the past two decades, many methods of implementing all-optical flip-flops have been proposed. Most of these suffer from speed limitations because of the low switching response of active devices. The frequency encoding technique has been used because of its many advantages. It can preserve its identity throughout data communication irrespective of loss of light energy due to reflection, refraction, attenuation, etc. The action of polarization-rotation-based very fast switching of semiconductor optical amplifiers increases processing speed. At the same time, tristate optical flip-flops increase information handling capacity. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America