High-speed optical bit-pattern recognition employing fibre Bragg grating and Opto-VLSI processing

We propose a novel optical bit-pattern recognition employing an Opto-VLSI processor in conjunction with an array of fibre Bragg gratings (FBGs) with different Bragg wavelengths and a coherent-to-incoherent light converter. The FBG array slices the spectrum of the incoherent optical header and provides wavelength-dependent time delays, whereas the Opto-VLSI processor generates wavelength intensity profiles that match specific bit patterns. The recognition of 8-bit optical patterns is experimentally demonstrated at 2.2 Gb/s by showing that the correlator produces an autocorrelation waveform of high peak whenever the input bit pattern matches the wavelength intensity profile. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.