Developing a parallel-readout optical-disk system

Optical-disk technology offers high storage densities with the possibility of parallel readout. Simply by illuminating a disk area containing more than one bit and appropriately encoding the bits, this technology permits retrieval of multiple data in parallel. When used in conjunction with a custom-designed parallel optoelectronic processing system, such systems meet the front-end storage and processing requirements for parallel-computing applications. The content-addressable memory system we are developing should prove useful for future very large database systems.<>