Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Optik journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijleo Original research article Design of optimized all-optical NAND gate using metal-insulator- metal waveguide Ajaypreet Singh a , Amrindra Pal a, ⁎ , Yadvendra Singh b , Sandeep Sharma a a Department of Electronics & Comm. Engineering, DIT University, Dehradun, 248009, India b Photonics Lab, Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Plasmonic Mach-Zehnder interferometer Kerr effect Finite-difference-time-domain method Surface Plasmons ABSTRACT In this work, an optimized design of all-optical NAND gate using plasmonic-based Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (P-MZI) is proposed using the metal-insulator-metal waveguide. It is an essential element for ultra-fast logic designing in integrated circuits at nanoscale. The proposed structure is designed with the minimum number of P-MZIs to operate in 1550nm wavelength. The chip area of the proposed devices is × 40 7.5 μm. The performance is analyzed and ER and IL obtained as 10.25 dB and 0.756dB respectively which are promising data for the device. The analysis is done via MATLAB software and finite-difference time domain (FDTD) method and the proposed device is studied. 1. Introduction The ever-increasing demand for high-speed system urges to design a system with lower complexity and power consumption. The conventional use of electrical signal in circuit designing has several problems associated with it eventually causing signal delay and maximum speed is limited to 1Gbps [1]. Due to these reasons, researchers have shifted the focus towards optics in which optical signal is used as information signal there by improving the frequency [2,3]. Different types of optical techniques are employed for the designing of interferometry circuits having configurations such as insulator-metal-insulator (IMI), dielectric-loaded surface plasmon polaritons waveguide (DLSPPW) [4], metal-slot waveguide [5], and metal-insulator-metal (MIM) waveguides [6,7]. All the basic and universal logic gates have already been implemented utilizing lithium-niobate (LiNbO3) [8–11] and Semiconductor optical amplifier Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (SOA-MZI) [12–14]. SOA-MZI based devices have some limitations such as gain saturation and re- quirement of the huge driving current in the circuit. An electrical signal is used to switch the optical signal by applying a desired voltage across the electrodes in LiNbO3-based configuration [8,15]. Decreasing the device size increases the vulnerability of the diffraction limit, thus is restraining the device size. Thus, the device size limits to thousands of micrometers which is not reliable for use in the construction of future applications. The larger surface area also contributes to the cost factor for realization, making it unreliable for use. The current work proposes, optimization of area in NAND gate structure. The realization of this universal gate has been achieved using only two MZI’s compared to earlier design employing four MZI’s[16–18]. MIM configuration has been chosen due to its ability to route the optical signal at the nanoscale and to confine it to deep sub-wavelength scale [7]. The result have been discussed to support the proposed design. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijleo.2019.01.098 Received 1 January 2019; Accepted 26 January 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: amrindra.pal123@gmail.com (A. Pal). Optik - International Journal for Light and Electron Optics 182 (2019) 524–528 0030-4026/ © 2019 Published by Elsevier GmbH. T