Parallel all-optical programmable logic array based on multichannel four-wave mixing

Canonical logic units-based programmable logic array (CLUs-PLA) is an important combinational logic device for its flexibility and user-defined feature. All-optical high-speed CLUs-PLA will lay the foundation for future high-speed optical computing and optical logic processing chip. For standard three-input all-optical CLUs-PLA, one nonlinear device can produce only one type of three-input CLU. In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a scheme that one nonlinear device can produce eight different types of three-input CLUs simultaneously, owing to introducing bidirectional four-wave mixing and wavelength spacing optimization. We obtain error-free performance for all three-input CLUs operations at 40 Gb/s. Comparing to standard three-input all-optical CLUs-PLA, parallel all-optical CLUs-PLA based on our proposed scheme can greatly reduce the number of nonlinear devices and simplify the computing system.