Design of a compact digital to analog converter with optical Kerr effect

This article presents a novel 2-bit digital-to-analog converter design based on photonic crystals. In this structure, a nonlinear Kerr effect has been considered to transfer the light intensity inside the ring resonator, which can control the optical behavior of the digital-to-analog converter. There are two nonlinear ring resonators on top and bottom of the structure. Also, inside each ring, some nonlinear rods have been shown in black. The rods designed in this structure are based on Silicon, and their refractive index is 3.46. Also, the linear and nonlinear refractive index for black rods in the ring resonators are 1.4 and [Formula: see text] , respectively. This structure has a footprint of 324 µm², of which there are 31 linear rods in the X direction and 31 linear rods in the Y direction. Also, the sampling rate is 125 GS/s, with the lowest casualties in output power. The analysis of this proposed digital-to-analog converter uses finite difference time domain (FDTD) and Plane Wave Expansion (PWE) methods.