학술논문

All-Optical Toggle Flip-Flop Based on Monolithic Semiconductor Ring Laser
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Photonics Technology Letters IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett. Photonics Technology Letters, IEEE. 26(1):96-99 Jan, 2014
Subject
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Photonics and Electrooptics
Flip-flops
Optical pulses
Optical bistability
Optical feedback
Optical fibers
Logic gates
Optical flip-flop
all-optical signal processing
semiconductor laser
semiconductor ring laser
optical computing
Language
ISSN
1041-1135
1941-0174
Abstract
A novel monolithic all-optical flip-flop of the toggle type with two complementary outputs is demonstrated based on a semiconductor ring laser (SRL), where the intrinsic directional bistability of the SRL device is combined with the saturable absorption effect that takes place in the reverse-biased input waveguides. Toggle flip-flop (TFF) operation is experimentally demonstrated using optical trigger toggle pulses of 500 ps duration. The achieved bit-rate of 500 Mb/s is the highest reported so far for all-optical TFFs. The operational speed is limited by the carrier recovery time of the saturable absorbers; however, the proposed technology has potential for multi-gigabits per second operation.