OR-Inverter Graphs for the Synthesis of Optical Circuits

The advances in silicon photonics motivate theconsideration of optical circuits as a promising circuit technology. Recently, synthesis for this kind of circuits received significantattention. However, neither the corresponding function descriptions nor the resulting synthesis approaches explicitly consideredhow optical circuits actually conduct computations – eventuallyleading to circuits of improvable quality. In this work, we presenta synthesis flow which has explicitly been developed for thistechnology. To this end, we introduce and exploit OR-Invertergraphs (OIGs) – a data-structure which is particularly suitedfor the design of optical circuits. Experimental results confirmthe efficacy of the OIG structure and the resulting synthesisapproach. Compared to several alternative solutions – relyingon conventional function representations – the number of gatescan be reduced by half or even significantly more than that.