Ultrafast all-optical AND gate based on cascaded SOAs with assistance of optical filters

Abstract

An ultrafast all-optical logic AND gate is realised based on two cascaded Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) each followed by an optical filter to accelerate the effective recovery process of the SOAs. 40 Gbit/s operation with return-to-zero signals has been achieved with SOAs, the 90–10% recovery time of which is much greater than the single bit period. Clear open eyes with quality factor of 6.3 are observed. The proposed AND gate has a potentially loose requirement on input pulse width.