Optical digital computers-devices and architecture

Author

Huang, A.

Author_Institution

AT&T Bell Lab., Holmdel, NJ

Volume

35

Issue

12

fYear

1988

fDate

12/1/1988 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

2428

Abstract

The use of optics to connect chip to chip and gate to gate fails to take advantage of the connectivity of optics. A lens can easily convey a 100×100 array of spots, which can be considered as a 10000-pin connector. Electronics cannot support this connectivity. Advances in using this parallelism are described. One technique, called symbolic substitution, forces computation into a regular format amenable to optical space-invariant interconnections. Another technique, called computational origami, folds a computation to achieve an arbitrary hardware/time tradeoff which can be used to match a computation to the parallelism of optics. Progress in developing optical logic gates is outlined. Efforts directed toward studying various organic materials with the hope of finding stronger nonlinearities are noted

Keywords

computer architecture; optical information processing; optical interconnections; technological forecasting; 10000 pin interconnect; arbitrary hardware/time tradeoff; chip to chip interconnect; computational origami; computer architecture; connectivity; connectivity of optics; gate to gate interconnect; nonlinearities; optical devices; optical digital computers; optical interconnect; optical logic gates; optical space-invariant interconnections; organic materials; parallelism of optics; symbolic substitution; Computer architecture; Concurrent computing; Connectors; Hardware; Lenses; Logic gates; Optical computing; Optical interconnections; Organic materials; Parallel processing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Electron Devices, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9383

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/16.8830

Filename

8830