Optical RAM Row Access With WDM-Enabled All-Passive Row/Column Decoders

Author

Alexoudi, T. ; Papaioannou, S. ; Kanellos, G.T. ; Miliou, A. ; Pleros, N.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Inf., Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

Volume

26

Issue

7

fYear

2014

fDate

1-Apr-14

Firstpage

671

Lastpage

674

Abstract

In this letter, we present new architectural perspectives in optical static RAM configurations by exploiting the wavelength dimension in address domain. We present a 2 × 4 optical RAM row decoder (RD) that relies its operation on an all-passive wavelength-selective filtering matrix ( λ-matrix), receiving WDM-formatted address bits (Wordline) as input. The 2 × 4 RD is followed by an semiconductor optical amplifier Mach-Zehnder interferometer access gate and a column decoding unit to provide complete optical RAM row access. Proof-of-concept experimental verification of a 2 × 4 optical RAM RD is shown at 10 Gb/s, providing error-free operation with a peak power penalty lower than 0.2 dB.

Keywords

Mach-Zehnder interferometers; decoding; optical filters; optical information processing; optical storage; random-access storage; semiconductor optical amplifiers; wavelength division multiplexing; SOA Mach-Zehnder interferometer access gate; WDM-enabled all-passsive row-column decoders; all-passive wavelength-selective filtering matrix; optical RAM RD; optical RAM row access; optical RAM row decoder; optical static RAM configurations; semiconductor optical amplifier; wavelength dimension; Adaptive optics; Decoding; Optical amplifiers; Optical filters; Optical interferometry; Random access memory; Wavelength division multiplexing; Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI); Optical row decoder; optical RAM; optical memory; optical signal processing; semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA);

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Photonics Technology Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1041-1135

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LPT.2014.2302854

Filename

6728729