All-Optical Binary Pattern Recognition at 42 Gb/s

In this paper, a programmable binary pattern recognition system that also indicates the temporal position of the matched target sequence is described. The system employs all-optical logic gates, and the number of gates required by the system is independent of the length of the target bit sequence. Experimental results with 42.6 Gb/s input data and target patterns up to 256 bits in length are presented.