Development of free-space digital optics in computing

To someone with an electronics or computer science background, many of optical computing´s concepts may seem outlandish. Optics grew out of applied physics and still retains many aspects of that heritage. This is in contrast to digital computing´s roots in electronics. Recent efforts have been made to bring optical computing more in line with microelectronic engineering. Perhaps that will speed the acceptance of opto-electronic technology. The authors describe their research into optical devices for data communication. They are investigating free-space optics, the propagation of optical signals through the air using lenses and mirrors to focus and redirect the beams. The advantages of free-space optics, derive from their large spatial bandwidth and physical channel density. Like the human eye, which takes in an enormous amount of information in parallel, a low-cost lens can provide more than a million independent connections. The authors aim to exploit optoelectronic computing´s capability for such massively parallel data transfers.