M.Sc Student | Larom Bar |
---|---|
Subject | Programmable All-Optical Logic Gate for Optical Processing in Telecommunications |
Department | Department of Electrical Engineering | Supervisor | Professor Emeritus Moshe Nazarathy |
Full Thesis text | ![]() |
Optical logic has been a topic of
vivid interest in recent years, due to its potential in eliminating the
bottleneck currently associated with purely electronic information processing
in ultra high-speed photonic networks. In order to properly function in a logic
system, logic gates must adhere to basic properties such as logic
functionality, bit restoration, gate fanout, and gate-to-gate isolation. In
this work, we demonstrate the implementation of a programmable optical logic
gate that may be multiply cascaded and reconfigured to create an optical logic
chip.
The gate is composed of a linear front-end where Boolean optical inputs are
combined with a reference signal which specifies the logic function (AND, NOR,
XNOR...), followed by a nonlinear back-end that removes the signal phase, and
is critical for the gate operation. With the frequency response limited only by
the physical constraints of the nonlinear media, the optical gate may function
at the high bit rates required by the telecommunications industry. In
principle, our gate's inherent design flexibility allows its implementation in
free-space optics, optical fibers or integrated optics at any bit rate. We
experimentally demonstrate a low-bit rate two-gate cascade in an optical fiber
system operating in the RF carrier (envelope) domain, satisfying the
cascadability requirements and providing a proof-of-concept of this technology.
We present this work in two parts: (i): the theory behind the reconfigurable
logic gate, including an analysis of noise in the linear module and
implementation options for the nonlinear module; (ii): the practical demonstration
of a two-gate cascade.