All-optical Flip-flop based on Optical Beating and Bistability in an Injection-locked Fabry-Perot Laser Diode

Abstract

We report a new all-optical flip-flop (AOFF) with a quite simple structure, using optical beating in an injection-locked Fabry-Perot laser diode (FP-LD) with optical bistability. While conventional AOFF methods using an injection-locked FP-LD require additional devices such as secondary FP-LDs or polarization controllers for reset operation, the proposed method can be implemented using only a single commercially available FP-LD with set and reset signals. The optical beating induces intensity fluctuations inside the FP-LD, and releases the locking state to the reset state. Even though we demonstrated the AOFF at 100 Mbit/s, we expect that its operation rate could extend to 10 Gbit/s, according to the limit of the FP-LD’s frequency response.