Integrated photonic look-up memory architectures to relieve the memory bottlenecks

Optical Random Access Memories (RAMs) have been conceived as high-bandwidth alternatives of their electronic counterparts, raising expectations for ultra-fast operation that can resolve the ns-long electronic RAM access bottleneck. In addition, with electronic Address Look-Up tables operating still at speeds of only up to 1 GHz, the constant increase in optical switch i/o data rates will yield severe latency and energy overhead during forwarding operations. In this invited paper, we present an overview of our recent research, introducing an all-optical RAM cell that performs both Write and Read functionalities at 10Gb/s, reporting on a 100% speed increase compared to state-of-the-art optical/electrical RAM demonstrations. Moreover, we present an all-optical Ternary-CAM cell that operates again at 10 Gb/s, doubling the speed of the fastest optical/electrical CAMs so far. To achieve this, we utilized a monolithically integrated InP optical Flip-Flop and a Semiconductor Optical Amplifier-Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (SOA-MZI) operating as an Access Gate to the RAM, and as an XOR gate to the T-CAM. These two demonstrations pave the way towards the vision of integrated photonic look-up memory architectures in order to relieve the memory bottlenecks.