DIFFERENTIAL PAIR OF OPTICAL THYRISTORS AS A GENERAL OPTICAL-INTERCONNECT DEVICE

A very sensitive differential pair of GaAs optical thyristors can be s lightly modified to accomodate optoelectronic and electrooptic convers ion. This allows interfacing with silicon standard CMOS VLSI circuitry , for the purpose of parallel optical interconnects. The authors condu ct a theoretical study to assess this possibility and demonstrate that the degradation of the performance of the thyristor pair, as a result of electrically probing its state, can be kept reasonably small, even at high frequencies.