Abstract

An important operation in a communications system is packet header recognition. For future high-speed time-division-multiplexed (TDM) systems, a packet header recognizer needs to distinguish between the various packet headers on a ultrafast time scale to avoid placing a bottleneck on the system. Frequency-domain processing [1,2] of femtosecond optical pulses has been shown to be capable of performing correlations in the frequency-domain in parallel rather than serially in the time-domain. Unfortunately, the input optical pattern can only be compared to a single packet at a time, which forfeits some of the advantages gained by the frequency-domain processing.

© 1996 Optical Society of America