Because of its unique characteristics, such as small size, low power consumption, wide gain bandwidth, integration potential, and ease of connection with other optical devices, the semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) has played a major role as a nonlinear element in the design of all-optical logic gates in recent years. Despite these appealing characteristics, traditional SOAs suffer from a slow gain recovery time, which makes them difficult to use in applications with data rates above 100 Gb/s.

Efforts to overcome the SOA's physical limitation have so far included using different optical devices such as quantum dot SOA, photonic crystal SOA, and reflective SOA. In support of these efforts, Amer Kotb at the CIOMP and his co-authors introduce the carrier reservoir SOA (CR-SOA) as a new option for realizing all-optical NOT-AND (NAND) and exclusive-NOR (XNOR) logic gates for 120 Gb/s return-to-zero (RZ) data, for the first time. CR -SOAs have faster gain and phase recovery, allowing them to execute all-optically Boolean logic operations at higher speeds.

In this work, the Adams numerical approach implemented in Wolfram Mathematica is used to solve all time-dependent equations. The quality factor and related bit error rate are used to compare the logical performance of CR-SOAs and conventional SOAs for all-optical NAND and XNOR operations at 120 Gb/s.

In comparison to traditional bulk SOAs, the results reveal that CR-SOAs are superior for realizing the investigated logic operations at the target rate since more acceptable performance and higher quality logic outcomes are achieved.