Reconfigurable All-Optical Logic Gates for Multi-Input Differential Phase-Shift Keying Signals: Design and Experiments

Differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) signals are promising candidate for the long-haul transmission systems. However, the development of the all-optical signal processing techniques for the DPSK signals is still in its infancy, especially the all-optical logic operations. In this work, a general scheme for reconfigurable logic gates for multi-input DPSK signals with integration possibility is proposed. Benefiting from the optical logic minterms developed by two kinds of optical devices, i.e., optical delay interferometers and semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs), target logic functions can be realized by combining specific minterms together. The scheme is reconfigured by changing the phase control of the delay interferometers or the input wavelengths. The latter approach was adopted in the experimental trials. Although the outputs of the scheme are on-off keying (OOK) signals, the data format is compatible with all-optical decision circuits where OOK format is preferred. Two- and three-input experiments are carried out at 20 Gbit/s with nonreturn-to-zero DPSK signals. Various logic operations are demonstrated, including full sets of two- and three-input minterms, AND, NOR, XOR, and XNOR logic operations where the AND and NOR logic are derived simultaneously and the XOR and XNOR logic are convertible. The optical SNR as well as the Q-factor of the two- and three-input results are measured and compared. It shows that the input powers to the SOAs are critical in achieving good extinction ratio and the Q-factor of logic results degrades when several minterms are combined. The recovery time of the SOAs need to be optimized as well. Finally, the scaling issues of the scheme are discussed.