Experimental study on all-optical half-adder based on semiconductor optical amplifier

We demonstrate a novel all-optical half-adder based on two semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAS). Two optical band-pass filters are used to select the two idlers generated by four-wave mixing (FWM) effect of the first SOA. Therefore, the AND gate and XNOR logic are realized simultaneously. The second SOA acts as a NOT gate, in which the NOR logic is achieved with the input of the logic XNOR. As a result, the output is the sum of the two input bits and the carry. In the experiment, all-optical half-addition calculation is achieved between two 10 Gb/s signals.