Design and performance analysis of all-optical cascaded adder using SOA-based MZI

With the performance enhancements in all-optical signal processing and switching schemes in terms of data rate and processing speed, various devices enabled with all-optical operation are becoming primary requirements for current and future telecommunications and data networks. All-optical logic gates represent the best solution to realize both combinational as well as sequential devices in the optical domain, representing the basic building blocks for optical computing circuits. We propose herein an all-optical cascaded adder whose elementary blocks are a half-adder and full-adder, designed using semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA)-based Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) gate configurations. They have high thermal stability and require low power. The nonlinear effects in the SOA device are used to implement different logic operations. The proposed cascaded adder was simulated in OptiSystem. The optical signal-to-noise ratio, bit error rate (BER), and Q-factor values were evaluated for different data rates. The design showed good performance up to 60 Gbps. The proposed design could find application in implementation of multistage arithmetic logic units.