Sagnac fiber logic gates and their possible applications: a system perspective

The Sagnac all-optical fiber logic gate functions as a two-input AND gate, a two-input AND gate with one inverting input, or both. The fiber logic gate is pipelined and has a fixed latency. This latency has no effect on feed-forward combinatoric circuits. The latency can be used to time multiplex circuits or to time multiplex gates to emulate a circuit. Possible applications such as a bit-jitter-tolerant communications system, an asynchronous communications system, a bit-interleaved self-routing switching system, an exchange/bypass permutation unit, and a folded universal state machine are discussed.