An all-optical architecture of serial to parallel converter by using Kerr type of non-linear material

Optics is a strong and potential candidate in the field of both communication and data processing because of its several inherent advantages. In digital communication the conversion of serial to parallel and parallel to serial data is very much essential for adopting some special modulation. In this communication the authors propose a new concept of developing an all-optical converter which converts a serial data to parallel one. For this purpose the authors use several optical logic gates specifically AND, NOT, NAND gates. Also an optical memory (Flip-Flop) circuit is used to do the processing. As it is known that, one Flip-Flop is required to store only one bit, hence, the number of Flip-Flops will be equal to the number of required data to be converted. Here, a two bit serial data is converted to the two bit parallel data and then the scheme is generalized for converting n bit serial data to parallel one. The main advantage of the scheme is that, it gives a super-fast processing speed which can be used in optical communication as well as in computation. © 2010 Optical Society of India.