BDD-Based Synthesis for All-Optical Mach-Zehnder Interferometer Circuits

With the advancements in fabrication technology and the emergence of very high performance systems in VLSI, the interest for optical interconnects and optical functional on-chip units increased significantly. Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) switches based on Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (SOAs) have been used as optical building blocks and allowed the synthesis of important Boolean functions such as multiplexers or adders. However, no automatic synthesis approach for arbitrary Boolean functions has been proposed yet. In this work, we introduce such a scheme. For this purpose, we make use of Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs). A technology library is proposed where all possible BDD node configurations are identified and associated with corresponding all-optical sub-circuits. This library is utilized in order to map a BDD representing an arbitrary function into an all-optical circuit using a linear-time algorithm. Experimental evaluations confirm that this leads to an efficient realization of the considered functions.