Ultrafast performance of all-optical AND and OR logic operations at 160 Gb/s using photonic crystal semiconductor optical amplifier

The light confined and controlled by photonic crystals (PCs) can be exploited to enhance the performance and reduce the size of semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) in which they are embedded. By incorporating PCSOAs in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, or using a PCSOA followed by a delayed interferometer, Boolean AND and OR gates are formed, respectively, whose performance when executed all-optically (AO) is thoroughly analyzed at 160 Gb/s. For this purpose, the variation of the quality factor against the critical data signal and PCSOA operating factors is examined and assessed when the effects of amplified spontaneous emission and working temperature are included to make the simulation more realistic. The results obtained from the conducted theoretical study suggest that leveraging the PCSOAs benefits of low absorption loss, suppressed undesirable nonlinear effects, low power consumption, and high power transmission favors realizing the considered AO gates at the target data rate. Compared to conventional SOAs, PCSOAs advanced technology allows to obtain better logic performance, as quantified by the achieved higher metrics values, and to render the practical implementation of the AO gates more feasible, since the requirements for the PCSOAs structural parameters and driving conditions become more relaxed.