Wave-based quasi-digital logic operations

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel approach to electromagnetic wave-based computing by emulating logic gates with linear waveguide networks, enabling high-speed, parallel digital-like operations without nonlinear components.

Contribution

It introduces a quasi-digital linear system method for implementing logic operations using waveguides, expanding electromagnetic computing capabilities beyond nonlinear processes.

Findings

Successfully simulated 2-input logic gates using waveguides

Extended the approach to multi-input operations like AND and adders

Demonstrated potential for high-speed electromagnetic computing

Abstract

Electromagnetic wave-based computing has emerged as an exciting paradigm with the potential to enable high-speed, parallel operations. In conventional computing, elementary logic gates, such as AND, OR, NOT and XOR, form the building blocks of larger interconnected logic circuits. These operations are inherently non-linear processes, which may be challenging to implement using an electromagnetic wave-matter based systems. In this work, we discuss how one may instead emulate the functionality of certain logic gates by using quasi-digital linear systems (in this case networks of interconnected parallel plate waveguides). This is done by carefully designing the encoding scheme of the input bits (how the input state of each bit maps to an incident electromagnetic signal) and the high/low classification regions of the output signal. To demonstrate this approach, full-wave numerical simulation of elementary 2-input operations are presented. This technique is then extended to many-to-one and many-to-many operations such as an N-input AND, half, full and a 2-bit full-adder. We envision that this quasi-digital linear computing technique may help enable new opportunities for electromagnetic wave-based computing.