Title :
Optical digital computers-devices and architecture
Author_Institution :
AT&T Bell Lab., Holmdel, NJ
fDate :
12/1/1988 12:00:00 AM
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;
Journal_Title :
Electron Devices, IEEE Transactions on
