Silicon microring resonator based all-optical 3-input majority gate and its applications

Abstract

In this study, we propose an all-optical majority gate using silicon waveguide-based microring resonator for the first time to our knowledge. All-optical microring resonator based majority gate has attractive properties such as energy-efficient, ultra-high-speed, and compact which are essential for optical computing. We have designed different logic circuits such as AND, OR, NOR, NAND, and one-bit full adder by exploiting the majority gate with inverter circuits. Optoelectronic conversion which limits the operational speed is avoided in our design. The operational speed of our design is nearly 260 Gbps. The required pump power for switching is only 1.66 mW for micro-ring resonator based switch which is very less comparatively. These designs have been realized in MATLAB as well as in Ansys Lumerical finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulation platform. The "figure of merits" of the presented majority gate is achieved numerically through simulation. The obtained values of extinction ratio and contrast ratio are much higher for the proposed majority gate and the values are 28.11 dB and 32.88 dB, respectively. The on-off ratio is also high for single microring resonator and it is 38.2 dB.