Investigation on Expanding the Computing Capacity of Optical Programmable Logic Array Based on Canonical Logic Units

Abstract

A general structure of an all-optical canonical logic based programmable logic array (CLUs-PLA) based on three methods to expand its computing capacity is presented. These methods include introducing bidirectional structure for nonlinear devices, utilizing wavelength multicast of four-wave mixing (FWM), and exploiting different nonlinear effects simultaneously, which fully utilize the parallelism of optical signals. Aiming at this general structure, we quantitatively analyze its computing capacity in detail, which is obviously enlarged comparing with the standard CLUs-PLA. To demonstrate our proposal, an experiment of CLUs’ simultaneous generation in nine parallel wavelength channels using bidirectional FWM is carried out. Comparing with the standard CLUs-PLA, the computing capacity of the expanded one is enlarged to 7.5 times.