OPTICAL DIGITAL-COMPUTERS - DEVICES AND ARCHITECTURE

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 10,000-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 whch 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.