Photonic crystal-based all-optical arithmetic circuits without SOA-based switches

Various proposed optical computing devices involve nonlinear optical operation and use semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA)-based switches as fundamental elements for logic operations. Due to the nonlinear operation, these devices suffer from high power that causes problems in very large-scale optical integration. In this paper, a method is proposed to implement arithmetic operations using a photonic crystal (PhC) cell and eliminate the SOA-based switches altogether. The proposed method is employed on designing an all-optical full adder/subtractor circuit that requires only beam combiners and photonic crystal NOT gates.