LAUSR

Abstract It is known that the conventional bulk semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) faces the problem of the slow gain recovery time, which limits its application as a nonlinear element at higher data rates. Therefore, our goal is to find an alternative that works at higher rates with acceptable performance. In this paper, we employ, for the first time to our knowledge, a carrier reservoir SOA (CR-SOA) followed by a delayed interferometer (DI) to execute all-optically the Boolean OR operation at a data rate of 100 Gb/s. A performance comparison between the CR-SOA- and the conventional bulk SOA-based DI is made by studying the variation of the quality factor (Q-factor) against various key operating parameters, which include the transition time from the carrier reservoir to the active region, the population inversion factor, the injection current, the equivalent pseudorandom binary sequence length, the alpha-factor, the optical confinement factor, the operating data rate, the input pulse energy, and the continuous wave power in the presence of amplified spontaneous emission noise. The obtained results demonstrate that owing to the CR-SOA faster gain and phase recovery, the CR-SOA-DI is more suitable for realizing the OR logic gate at 100 Gb/s as it manages to achieve a more than acceptable Q-factor value of 9, compared to the unacceptable value of 3 when using the conventional SOA-DI.