Abstract

Recent patents and progress on all-optical binary pattern recognition using the passive correlator and all-optical logic gates have been reviewed. The correlator is relative simpler and easy to be implemented, however the path number of the correlator is dependent on the length of target pattern. In contrast, the pattern recognition system based on alloptical SOA logic gates can be a promising alternative even for high bit-rate optical signals. It is shown that, the gate count can be reduced dramatically when employing serial logical processing, which allows also reconfiguration capability of the target patterns.

Keywords: All-optical logic gates, correlator, Mach-Zehnder interferometer, pattern recognition, semiconductor optical amplifier