Investigations of all optical 2×4 decoder based on PhC structure and nonlinear ring resonators

Abstract In this paper, all optical 2 × 4 decoder (AODEC) is provided using threshold switching method in 2D photonic crystal (PC) structures which has low optical loss and most widely used in photonic integrated circuits (PICs). The proposed optical decoder is designed using silicon pillars with a refractive index of 3.46 perforated in the air background in a cubic lattice with a lattice constant of 585 nm. The proposed structure is composed of seven optical waveguides and three nonlinear ring resonators. Plane wave expansion (PWE) and finite difference time domain (FDTD) methods have been used to obtain and analyze the photonic band gap (PBG) range and performance of the designed AODEC, respectively. The proposed optical device achieves a contrast ratio (CR) of 8.98 dB, time delay of 2 ps and switching speed of 500 GHz at the optical wavelengths of 1550 nm. According to results, high data bit rate and contrast ratio, compactness, low power consumption and ultra‐fast operation are the main advantages of designed 2 × 4 AODEC compared with the previous structures.