Gates vs. Splitters

Abstract

Optical circuits are considered a promising emerging technology for applications in ultra-high-speed networks or interconnects. However, the development of (automatic) synthesis approaches for such circuits is still in its infancy. Although first generic and automatic synthesis approaches have been proposed, no clear understanding exists yet on how to keep the costs of the resulting circuits as small as possible. In the domain of optical circuits, this is particularly interesting for the number of gates and the effect of so-called splitters to the signal strength. In this work, we investigate this relation by considering a variety of (existing as well as proposed) synthesis approaches for optical circuits. Our investigations show that reducing the number of gates and reducing the number of splitters are contradictory optimization objectives. Furthermore, the performance of synthesis guided with respect to gate efficiency as well as synthesis guided with respect to splitter freeness is evaluated and an overhead factor between the contradictory metrics is experimentally determined.