The present work lies within the scope of a general architecture analysis of all-optical cellular automaton involving optical nonlinearities. Here, we present all-optical subnanosecond invertor gates operating in transmission with picosecond pulses [30 ps full width at half height (FWHH)] through Cd_0.96Zn_0.04Te platelets (600 to 800 micrometers thick). The all-optical inversion is based on the induced absorption occurring in the spectral Urbach tail of the material. The temperature of the operation is 80 K. The input and output beams are at the same wavelength which is a critical condition for the cascadability of the device. The switch inversion energy is typically 3 - 5 pJ/micrometers ² around the wavelength (lambda) equals 782 - 783 nm at nitrogen temperature. We add an all-optical amplifier to the invertor in order to obtain for the gate an output level as strong as the input one and demonstrate the stability of the complete invertor-amplifier gate with a contrast between the high and low logical levels better than 2:1. Then, we use microlens arrays and demonstrate the simultaneous and parallel operations of several invertor gates.

Date Published: 28 June 1993
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 1807, Photonic Switching, (28 June 1993); doi: 10.1117/12.147915

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1807:
Photonic Switching
Andrey M. Goncharenko; Fedor V. Karpushko; George V. Sinitsyn; Sergey P. Apanasevich, Editor(s)