All-optical logic gates based on two-photon absorption in semiconductor optical amplifiers

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 two-photon 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 pseudo-random binary sequence generation at 250 Gb/s with good signal to noise ratio is feasible.