High-Performance All-Optical Logic Operations Using Ψ-Shaped Silicon Waveguides at 1.55 μm

Amer Kotb; Kyriakos E Zoiros; Chunlei Guo

doi:10.3390/mi14091793

High-Performance All-Optical Logic Operations Using Ψ-Shaped Silicon Waveguides at 1.55 μm

Micromachines (Basel). 2023 Sep 19;14(9):1793. doi: 10.3390/mi14091793.

Authors

Amer Kotb^{1

2}, Kyriakos E Zoiros³, Chunlei Guo⁴

Affiliations

¹ School of Chips, XJTLU Entrepreneur College (Taicang), Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Taicang, Suzhou 215400, China.
² Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, University of Fayoum, Fayoum 63514, Egypt.
³ Lightwave Communications Research Group, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, School of Engineering, Democritus University of Thrace, 67100 Xanthi, Greece.
⁴ The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA.

Abstract

We simulate with FDTD solutions a complete family of basic Boolean logic operations, which includes XOR, AND, OR, NOT, NOR, NAND, and XNOR, by using compact Ψ-shaped silicon-on-silica optical waveguides that are operated at a 1.55 μm telecommunications wavelength. Four identical slots and one microring resonator, all made of silicon deposited on silica, compose the adopted waveguide. The operating principle of these logic gates is based on the constructive and destructive interferences that result from the phase differences incurred by the launched input optical beams. The performance of these logic operations is evaluated against the contrast ratio (CR) metric. The obtained results suggest that the considered functions designed with the employed waveguide can be realized all-optically with higher CRs and faster speeds than other reported designs.

Keywords: contrast ratio; logic operations; Ψ-shaped silicon waveguide.

Grants and funding

This research received no external funding.