An All-Optical Address Look-Up Table Using Optical CAM and Optical RAM Banks

We report for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, the experimental demonstration of a complete all-optical 2-bit Address Look-Up (AL) table that performs address matching and forwarding and operates at 10Gb/s. The circuit incorporates an optical Content Addressable Memory (CAM) and an optical Random Access Memory (RAM) table that are interconnected via an optical Encoding/Decoding circuit. The AL table has been experimentally validated for different sets of CAM and RAM word contents as well as for different CAM and RAM row interconnect settings at 10Gb/s, revealing a power penalty of around 9 dB at a bit-error-rate (BER) of 10-9. Furthermore, we demonstrate experimental results of a fully integrated InP-based optical CAM cell, which includes an integrated XGM Flip-Flop (FF) memory cell and a Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) XNOR Access Gate (AG) and supports content addressing operation at 5 Gb/s. This fully-integrated optical CAM cell indicates a possible integration roadmap for the AL constituent building blocks towards the deployment of integrated optical ALs that can be utilized in optical routing or, more general, in optical content matching and forwarding operations.