Demonstration of electro-optic half-adder using silicon photonic integrated circuits

Ultracompact CMOS-compatible optical logic using carrier depletion in microdisk resonators

We present a CMOS-compatible optoelectronic directed logic architecture that achieves high computational throughput (number of operations per second per unit area) by its ultracompact form factor. High speed-to-power performance is also achieved, by the low capacitance and high junction-to-mode overlap of low-radii SOI vertical pn junction microdisk switches. By using wavelength-division multiplexing and two electrical control signals per disk, each switch performs (N)OR, (N)AND, and X(N)OR operations simultaneously. Connecting multiple switches together, we demonstrate higher-order scalability in five fundamental N-bit logic circuits: AND/OR gates, adders, comparators, encoders, and decoders. To the best of our knowledge, these circuits achieve the lowest footprint of silicon-based multigigabit-per-second optical logic devices in literature.

Chip-integrated all-optical 4-bit Gray code generation based on silicon microring resonators

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a 4-port passive encoder for 4-bit Gray code on pure silicon platform. The operation principle for this device is the thermo-optic (TO) effect in silicon microring resonator (MRR) whose transmission spectrum could be shifted by injecting strong light power. Therefore, the output powers of both the through-port and drop-port of the MRR could be controllable and switchable. Two threshold powers are defined to decide the port output code of bit "0" or "1". By combining two independent resonant wavelengths of two MRRs and adjusting their powers in a certain order, all-optical 4-bit Gray code generation has been successfully demonstrated. The proposed integrated device is competent in on-chip all-optical communication and optical interconnection systems with significant advantages, such as simple operation, compact size, economical fabrication process and great scalability.