Pyramidical pipelining of AO cells for computing successive matrix powers

The paper describes an optical implementation for successive matrix powers, using an optical processor as a basic component for matrix/matrix multiplication with unidirectional data flow. Then, a series of optical processors are lined up to produce a pyramidical pipeline for successive matrix squarings. Suitable applications which would benefit include, besides the calculation of matrix powers, the evaluation of matrix polynomials, iterative solutions of linear equations, iterative matrix inversion, and the calculation of matrix functions, i.e. matrix exponential.