When the two-photon absorption of a high intensity pump beam takes place in a semiconductor optical amplifier there is an associated fast phase change of a weak probe signal. A scheme to realize fast all-optical XOR logic function using twophoton absorption induced phase change has been analyzed. Rate equations for semiconductor optical amplifiers, for input data signals with high intensity, configured in the form of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer has been solved. The input intensities are high enough so that the two-photon induced phase change is larger than the regular gain induced phase change. The model shows that both XOR operation and pseudorandom binary sequence generation at 250 Gb/s with good signal to noise ratio is feasible.

Date Published: 22 September 2010
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 7750, Photonics North 2010, 77501L (22 September 2010); doi: 10.1117/12.872774

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7750:
Photonics North 2010
Henry P. Schriemer; Rafael N. Kleiman, Editor(s)