We show that a monolithic and compact vertical cavity laser with intracavity saturable absorber can emit short excitable pulses. These calibrated optical pulses can be excited as a response to an input perturbation whose amplitude is above a certain threshold. Subnanosecond excitable response is promising for applications to novel all-optical devices for information processing or logical gates.

The design of an optical computer must be based on the characteristics of optics and optical technology, and not on those of electronic technology. The property of optical superposition is considered and the implications it has in the design of computing systems is discussed. It can be exploited in the implementation of optical gates, interconnections, and shared memory. INTRODUCTION Fundamenta...

Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) are a versatile core technology and the basis for the implementation of a number of key functionalities central to the evolution of highly wavelength-agile all-optical networks. We present an overview of the state of the art of SOAs and summarize a range of applications such as power boosters, preamplifiers, optical linear (gain-clamped) amplifiers, optic...

Ultrafast all-optical logic gates that accept optical inputs in which wavelength designates bit position within the overall byte are proposed and demonstrated. Four-wave mixing is shown to provide a conditional test function that can be used to construct any multi-input logic gate. Polarization provides the logic state for each bit. Implementations that use semiconductor optical amplifiers as t...

Considering the benefits of Quantum and Optics, if the logic gates in the quantum field and electronic structure are implemented using optical elements, then it will be benefited from advantages of Quantum and design, and these processing circuits can be used in optical computing and quantum computing, genetic processes, and other useful nanotechnology applications. In this study, we have intro...

Latching optical switches and optical logic gates with AND and OR functionality are demonstrated for the first time by the monolithic integration of a vertical cavity lasers with depleted optical thyristor structure. The thyristors have a low threshold current of 0.65 mA and a high on/off contrast ratio of more than 50 dB. By simply changing a reference switching voltage, this single device ope...

The main theoretical and experimental backgrounds of two-photon absorption (TPA) and TPA-induced free carriers in silicon are presented in detail. In particular, the mostly recent experimental achievements in applications of TPA and TPAinduced free carriers are discussed, such as optical limiting, optical pulse shaping, all-optical switching and modulation, alloptical logic gates, all-optical w...

In this paper, we propose the construction of two code generators for optical ZCZ codes of Zcz = 4n−2 with positive n and Zcz = 1 using the Sylvester-type Hadamard matrix, which are called ROM-type and non ROM-type code generators. The optical ZCZ code is a set of pairs of binary and bi-phase sequences with zero correlation zone. An optical code division multiple access (CDMA) system using opti...