All-optical analog-to-digital converters, hardlimiters, and logic gates

The authors propose and analyze the optical signal processing functionality of periodic structures consisting of alternating layers of materials possessing different Kerr nonlinearities. They explore structure-materials-performance relationships in all-optical analog-to-digital converters, hardlimiters, and AND and OR gates. They show that their proposed analog-to-digital converters can extract a binary word from multilevel optical signals in a single bit interval. They also propose a family of optical limiters whose output signal clamps to a set upper logic level for any input value exceeding a chosen threshold. They explore the performance of an all-optical logic gate whose forward-directed output implements a binary AND and whose backward-directed output implements an OR function