Design and analysis of SOA-MZI based optical digital circuits for high speed optical networks

•The utilization of SOA-MZI configuration for designing high-speed optical digital circuits in optical networks.•The circuits studied include all-optical inverters, decimal to binary code converters, and hexa decimal to binary code converters operating at a speed of 10 Gbps.•The SOA-MZI configuration capitalizes on the non-linear properties of the semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) to achieve all-optical logic functions.•The cross-phase modulation (XPM) technique is employed to make the incoming signal insensitive to polarization, offering superior performance compared to other types of SOA non-linearity.•The performance evaluation using an optisystem simulation showed promising results with metrics such as eye height of 0.0109, bit error rate (BER) of 3.45 e-70, and Q-factor of 17.66.