Compact and low-power optical logic NOT gate based on photonic crystal waveguides without optical amplifiers and nonlinear materials

An optical logic NOT gate (OLNG) is presented based on photonic crystal (PhC) waveguides without non-linear materials and optical amplifiers. Also, a way of determining the operating parameters is presented. It is demonstrated through finite-difference time-domain simulations that the structure presented can operate as an OLNG. The optimized contrast ratio, defined as the logic-1 output power divided by the logic-0 output power, is found to be 297.07 or 24.73 dB. The size of the OLNG can be as small as 7a x 7a, where a is the lattice constant of the PhC. Further, the OLNG presented in this paper can operate at a bit rate as high as 2.155 Tbit/s, which is much higher than that of electronic or optical logic gates developed until now. Moreover, as it is not based on the nonlinear effect, the OLNG can operate at very low powers and a relatively large operating bandwidth. This is favorable for large-scale optical integration and for developing multiwavelength parallel-processing optical logic systems. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America