Design and analysis of all-optical inverter using SOA-based Mach–Zehnder interferometer

In this paper an optical Boolean inverter gate has been simulated first time, with SOA-based Mach–Zehnder interferometer (SOA-MZI). The control and continuous clock pulse are properly selected so that SOA is heavily saturated and at the same time the switched out continuous clock pulse are compressed by the control pulse present there. To optimize the gate performance, the output contrast ratio (CR) and extinction ratio (ER) have been taken for the optimization criteria and the result is investigated at different Gb/s. However, the operation is limited by SOAs recovery time.