A new graduate course on optical computing

A new optical computing course offered at the graduate level is described. The term “optical computing” used here refers to the design of digital computer system modules and interconnections using optical/optoelectronic technologies. The course has been offered in the College of Computer Science and Engineering (CCSE), by both the computer engineering (COE) and the information and computer science (ICS) departments while the author was at King Fahd University of Petroleum & minerals (KFUPM). In essence, the course was intended for a wide audience. That is, students from other disciplines, such as the electrical engineering (EE) and systems engineering (SE), can register for the course as an elective. The course main topics are: motivation and background for optical computing; subsystems for optical computing that discusses the different types of optical interconnection networks, optical memory, optical arithmetic/matrix computations and related algorithms; and architectural models of computations where optical LAN’s/MAN’s, optical dataflow computers, optical cellular automata, and optical neural networks are discussed.