The semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) plays an important role in the development of the all-optical signal processing because of the advantages of simple structure, easy integration and strong non-linearity. Especially the nonlinear polarization rotation effect of SOA is receiving considerable interest by many researchers nowadays. The all-optical flip-flop using the properties of SOA also obtains widespread attention by researchers, as all-optical flip-flop is an important part in the field of all-optical signal processing. In this paper, a new all-optical flip-flop structure using polarization switch (PSW) based on polarization rotation effect of SOA is presented.

The main work of the paper is the simulation of all-optical logic gates and optical SR latch. The logic gate setup only uses one SOA, but it can get two different logic gates through a simulation. The extinction ratio of the logic gate is about 30dB. The structure of optical SR latch utilizes the two coupled polarization rotation switch of SOA. The structure of the flip-flop is based on these two parts. To demonstrate the feasibility of the structure, we analyze two types of flip-flops, including all-optical D and T flip-flops, whose clock pulse repetition rate is 1GHz with the pulse width of 0.3ns. The quality of all-optical flip-flop in this paper is measured by the falling and rising edge time. In the simulation, the falling edge time is about 50ps, while the rising edge time is higher than the falling edge time, because the gain increases slowly to the recovery time after the decrease of the gain of SOA. The results are useful for the development of all-optical flip-flop based on SOA.

Date Published: 9 November 2016
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 10017, Semiconductor Lasers and Applications VII, 1001718 (9 November 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2246304

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10017:
Semiconductor Lasers and Applications VII
Ninghua Zhu; Werner H. Hofmann, Editor(s)