Design and performance analysis of SOA–MZI based reversible toffoli and irreversible AND logic gates in a single photonic circuit

With the increasing flow of information, data rate is increasing very rapidly. This has resulted in increased amount of heat dissipation from the processing nodes. Generally electronic processors dissipate heat if the data rate is very high. Therefore electronic processors should be replaced by optical processors with optical gates as their foundation. Another reason for heat dissipation is the loss of information bits at the processing nodes. This can be reduced by introducing reversible computing. A combination of optical reversible and irreversible gates at the processing nodes can recover data and minimize power dissipation and consumption. In this article semiconductor optical amplifier–Mach–Zehnder interferometer based all optical reversible Toffoli gate and AND gate in a single photonic circuit has been designed. The performance of the gates has been analyzed through extinction ratio and quality factor. Different types of gates (reversible, irreversible) on a single photonic chip will slowly but surely lead towards all optical processing of data with added advantage of recovery of input data.