Design of SOA-MZI based all-optical programmable logic device (PLD)

Photon being the ultimate unit of information with unmatched speed and with data package in a signal of zero mass, the techniques of computing with light may provide a way out of the limitations of computational speed and complexity inherent in electronics computing. Information processing with photon as information carrying signal has shown a high level potentiality through the researches in last few decades. The driving force behind this evolution has been the utilization of interferometric configurations that employ a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) as the nonlinear element in combination with cross-phase modulation to achieve switching by means of light. Here, in this paper we present an all-optical circuit of programmable logic device (PLD) with the help of SOA-MZI (Mach-Zehnder interferometer) based optical tree-structured splitter. Numerical simulation result confirming described method is reported here. This paper also explains the applicability of this scheme to perform logical and arithmetic operations in all-optical domain.