Spatial-Spectral Materials for High Performance Optical Processing

Optically active Spatial-Spectral (S2) materials are a unique resource for spectrally based optical memory and processing. At cryogenic temperatures, the rare-earth ions in these materials individually exhibit narrow optical resonances on the order of MHz to sub-KHz, but are inhomogeneously broadened over GHz to THz spectral bandwidths providing up to 107 resolvable spectral channels. The material can be optically programmed to transform the spectral and spatial components of optical signals to perform signal processing operations such analog multiplications, time delay, filtering, convolutions, and correlations. We present work utilizing the S2 technology for high bandwidth (>32 GHz) and data rate selection and filtering, including processing of 1D data streams in real-time and 2D images. Despite cryogenic cooling, the power efficiency of the S2 technology compares favorably to CMOS in large scale systems. Finally, potential architectures for large (10(6) x 10(6)) vector-matrix multipliers using S2 materials are discussed.