RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SPEED AND TOLERANCES FOR SELF-ELECTRO-OPTIC-EFFECT DEVICES

We describe a method of calculating the relationship between system bit rates and tolerances to variations in optical powers for self-electro-optic-effect devices (SEED's). We show that high-contrast-ratio devices have improved bit rates in the presence of optical-power variations even for differential devices. We also calculate the ratios of control-beam to signal-beam powers and transfer-beam to clock-beam powers for logic SEED switching nodes and shift registers. Last, we show that the bit rate of optoelectronically cascaded devices, such as the logic SEED shift register, is comparable with that of optically cascaded symmetric SEED's.