Mach-Zehnder Interferometer Based All Optical Reversible NOR Gates

Abstract

Reversible logic has promising applications in dissipation less optical computing, low power computing, quantum computing etc. Reversible circuits do not lose information, and there is a one to one mapping between the input and the output vectors. In recent years researchers have implemented reversible logic gates in optical domain as it provides high speed and low energy computations. The reversible gates can be easily fabricated at the chip level using optical computing. The all optical implementation of reversible logic gates are based on semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) based Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI). The Mach-Zehnder interferometer has advantages such as high speed, low power, easy fabrication and fast switching time. In the existing literature, the NAND logic based implementation is the only implementation available for reversible gates and functions. There is a lack of research in the direction of NOR logic based implementation of reversible gates and functions. In this work, we propose the NOR logic based all optical reversible gates referred as all optical TNOR gate and all optical PNOR gate. The proposed all optical reversible NOR logic gates can implement the reversible boolean logic functions with reduced optical cost and propagation delay compared to their implementation using existing all optical reversible NAND gates. The advantages in terms of optical cost and delay is illustrated by implementing 13 standard boolean functions that can represent all 256 possible combinations of three variable boolean function.