Photonic crystal-based optical decoders: design methods and prospective

Optical decoders are one of the necessary building blocks that are required for realizing optical computation and optical processing systems. Photonic crystals have great potentials for designing different kinds of optical devices. They also have been used for designing different kinds of optical decoders. In this paper, we are going to present a comprehensive review of different mechanisms, methods and structures that have been proposed for designing photonic crystal-based optical decoders. All the proposed structures can be divided in two main categories: threshold switching-based decoders and beam interference-based structures. So many structure have been proposed using threshold switching but only there is one 1-to-2 optical decoder that was designed using beam interference.