Cascaded semiconductor optical amplifiers-based all-optical OR logic gate

Abstract

We present a novel study of the ultrafast performance of an all-optical OR logic gate using two-cascaded semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) at a data rate of 80 Gb s−1. The variation of the gate’s quality factor (Q-factor) against various key operating parameters, such as the continuous wave input power and wavelength, the operating data rate and the equivalent pseudorandom binary sequence length, is examined and assessed, taking into account the effects of SOAs amplified spontaneous emission and operating temperature to obtain results that are closer to reality. The simulation results indicate that the OR logic gate can be realized using the proposed two-cascaded SOAs scheme at 80 Gb s−1 with logical correctness and a Q-factor = 23.7, which is higher than that previously reported with other SOA-based schemes.