Differential pair of optical thyristors as a general optical-interconnect device

A very sensitive differential pair of GaAs optical thyristors can be slightly modified to accommodate optoelectronic and electrooptic conversion. This allows interfacing with silicon standard CMOS VLSI circuitry, for the purpose of parallel optical interconnects. The authors conduct a theoretical study to assess this possibility and demonstrate that the degradation of the performance of the thyristor pair, as a result of electrically probing its state, can be kept reasonably small, even at high frequencies