Numerical study of carrier reservoir semiconductor optical amplifier-based all-optical XOR logic gate
Amer Kotb, Kyriakos E. Zoiros, Wei Li
Abstract
The long carrier lifetime of the semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) limits its operation speed and exploitation as ultrafast nonlinear switching element. Therefore, an alternative SOA with a faster carrier lifetime is desired for high speed photonic applications. In this paper, we employ the carrier reservoir SOA (CR-SOA) for the first time to demonstrate through simulations the feasibility of all-optical exclusive-OR (XOR) logic gate at 100 Gb/s. For this purpose, a pair of CR-SOAs are incorporated in a Mach-Zehnder Interferometer. The variation of the quality factor (QF) against the key operating parameters is examined for both CR-SOAs- and conventional SOAs-based XOR gate at 100 Gb/s, including the effect of amplified spontaneous emission. The results show that not only higher but also acceptable QF is obtained at 100 Gb/s only when using CR-SOAscompared to conventional bulk SOAs, i.e. QF = 18.5 versus 3.3, respectively.