All-Optical Clocked Flip-Flops and Binary Counting Operation Using SOA-Based SR Latch and Logic Gates

All-optical digital devices are key components for advanced signal processing in next generation optical networks and optical computing. In most digital systems, photonic integrated circuits are required to carry out high-speed energy efficient functionalities. In this paper, an entire set of integrable all-optical clocked flip-flops and an all-optical binary counter are proposed, as applications of SR latches and logic gates previously introduced in literature. The SR latch is based on gain quenching mechanism between two coupled ring lasers using a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) as active element. Photonic logic functions are carried out by exploiting four wave mixing (FWM) and cross gain modulation (XGM) nonlinear effects in SOAs. Different flip-flop logical functionalities, including SR-, D-, T-, and JK-types, as well as an all-optical binary counter, are obtained by adding one of the logic gates, or a combination of them, to the latch scheme. The effectiveness of the proposed schemes is demonstrated by extinction ratio and Q-factor measurements. All solutions are tunable in the whole C-band and can work at different counting rate without any reconfiguration. Photonic integration allows to increase the functioning rate beyond gigahertz and reduce the switching energy.