Reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers-based all-optical NOR and XNOR logic gates at 120 Gb/s

In this paper, we reported a reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA), in which the input light propagates and reflects back to the input port after amplifying twice through its active region. The RSOA produces higher gain and lower noise figure at low drive currents with energy-efficient than the conventional SOAs. The RSOA’s features are employed herein to numerically analyze the ultrafast performance of the all-optical NOT-OR (NOR) and Exclusive-NOR (XNOR) logic gates using a dual-RSOAs-based scheme at 120 Gb/s. A comparison between RSOAs- and conventional SOAs-based AO NOR and XNOR gates is made by studying the quality factor (QF) against the critical operational parameters when the effects of the amplified spontaneous emission and the operating temperature are included to obtain more realistic results. Compared to conventional SOAs, the RSOAs allow to achieve more acceptable performance at 120 Gb/s and to render the implementation of the NOR and XNOR gates more feasible.