960 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 22, NO. 13, JULY 1, 2010
Simultaneous Implementation of Photonic Logic OR
and AND Gates for CSRZ-OOK Signals
Songnian Fu, Wen De Zhong, Senior Member, IEEE, P. Shum, Senior Member, IEEE, and Chinlon Lin, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—A simultaneous implementation of photonic OR and
AND logic gates for 10-Gb/s carrier-suppressed return-to-zero
on–off-keying (CSRZ-OOK) signals is demonstrated using de-
generate and nondegenerate four-wave mixing in a 60-m highly
nonlinear photonic crystal fiber (HNL-PCF). Two different wave-
length combinations of three-input lights, two input CSRZ-OOK
data together with a CSRZ-OOK clock, are proposed to flexibly
select the output wavelength of two logic AND gates and one logic
OR gate. Experimental demonstrations at 10-Gb/s CSRZ-OOK
format with clear waveforms, correct spectra, and bit-error rate
verify the logic integrity of the scheme. Although three input
wavelengths with a fixed spacing must be reserved in advance,
the proposed scheme is still promising for future ultra-high-speed
optical signal processing applications, due to the femtosecond
response of the HNL-PCF nonlinearity.
Index Terms—All-optical signal processing, four-wave mixing
(FWM), modulation format, photonic logic gate.
I. INTRODUCTION
P
HOTONIC logic gates are crucial elements in future
optical networks to implement various optical signal
processing functions such as data encryption, header recogni-
tion, parity checking, and label swapping. Boolean logic OR
and AND gates are essential logic gates and are the basis for
forming more complex all-optical functional blocks, modules,
or subsystems. In the past few years, many approaches using
highly nonlinear fibers (HNLFs), semiconductor optical am-
plifiers (SOAs), and waveguides have been proposed to realize
a single logic function [1]–[3] or implement reconfigurable
logic functions by varying the input power, the polarization,
or the operation wavelength [4]–[6]. The task becomes more
complex when two or more logic gates need to be realized
simultaneously. All-optical multiple logic gates with XOR, NOR,
OR, and NAND functions have been simultaneously realized for
nonreturn-to-zero on–off-keying (NRZ-OOK) signals using a
two-parallel SOA-Mach–Zehnder interferometer (SOA-MZI)
structure [7]. Recently, a scheme of simultaneously realizing
all-optical logic AND and NOR gates for NRZ differential
phase-shift keying (NRZ-DPSK) has been proposed and
demonstrated based on a delayed interferometer (DI) and
Manuscript received November 29, 2009; revised March 31, 2010; accepted
April 09, 2010. Date of publication April 19, 2010; date of current version June
09, 2010. This work was supported by Project 052 101 0107 of the Agency for
Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore and Open Fund of
Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications (Beijing
University of Posts and Telecommunications), Ministry of Education, China.
The authors are with the Network Technology Research Centre, School of
Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Sin-
gapore 637553, Singapore.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2010.2048424
Fig. 1. Experimental setup of photonic logic unit. LD: laser diode.
two SOAs [8]. However, the output formats of the signals
are changed from DPSK to OOK. Meanwhile, most existing
schemes of photonic logic gates are restricted to conventional
NRZ and RZ formats. The carrier-suppressed return-to-zero
(CSRZ) OOK format is another widely used modulation format,
as the CSRZ-OOK is a good candidate for the long-haul trans-
mission due to its resilience to the fiber nonlinearity and group
velocity dispersion [9]. However, because of the phase alterna-
tion between 0 and at each bit transition, it is challenging to
realize photonic logic gates for the CSRZ-OOK format. Except
for the AND logic gate using nonlinear effects of periodically
poled lithium niobate (PPLN) [10], no other photonic logic
for CSRZ-OOK has ever been reported, not even simultaneous
implementation of multiple photonic logic gates. In this letter,
based on both degenerate four-wave mixing (D-FWM) and
nondegenerate FWM (ND-FWM) arising in highly nonlinear
photonic crystal fiber (HNL-PCF), we propose and demon-
strate an all-optical scheme to simultaneously achieve logic OR
and AND functions for CSRZ-OOK signals. Compared with
the SOA-based approaches, our scheme can be potentially
operated at terabits per second thanks to the almost immediate
response of fiber nonlinearity. Moreover, two input wavelength
combinations are proposed in order to flexibly select the output
wavelength of two logic AND gates and one logic OR gate. Such
a simultaneous multifunction logic unit is relatively compact
and promising for future optical signal processing applications.
II. OPERATIONAL PRINCIPLE AND EXPERIMENTAL SETUP
Fig. 1 shows the experimental setup of the proposed pho-
tonic logic unit. Continuous-wave (CW) lights from two lasers
(LD 1 and LD 3) at the wavelength of and are com-
bined by a coupler, and then externally modulated by two
cascaded Mach–Zehnder modulators (MZMs) to generate two
CSRZ-OOK signals. MZM 1 is used to generate NRZ signals
driven by a pseudorandom binary sequence (PRBS)
electrical NRZ signal provided by a pulse pattern generator
(PPG). MZM 2 serves as a pulse carver to transform the NRZ
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