Patent ID: 7805049

Claim:
An all-optical memory device for storing an optical signal comprising a multiplicity of bits, the device comprising: an optical compactor operative to optically compact the optical signal thereby providing a compacted optical signal, the optical compactor comprising: a first coupler/decoupler operative to receive the optical signal and to output NF pattern replicas of the optical signal, where NF is an integer greater than one; NF optical gates operatively associated with the first coupler/decoupler, each of the NF optical gates being time-delay controlled to output chopped bits of a respective one of the NF pattern replicas of the optical signal at a different time window; a second coupler/decoupler operatively associated with the NF optical gates and the OMC, the second coupler/decoupler operative to combine the chopped bits corresponding to the NF pattern replicas of the optical signal thereby forming the compacted optical signal, and to provide the compacted optical signal to the OMC; and an optical memory cell (OMC) operatively associated with the optical compactor and operative to store the compacted optical signal for a period of time.