Abstract

Although there have been many proposals for digital optical computing using spatially invariant interconnections,¹ these systems have not provided truly general-purpose computing architectures. We have been examining a simple space-variant system that is capable of implementing any Boolean function and uses only as many gates as are required by an electronic implementation. We will show that this system has significant advantages over any spatially invariant system so far proposed, and that because our system can implement arbitrarily complex functions efficiently, control can be optical. This allows either SIMD or MIMD computations to be performed, potentially simultaneously.

© 1990 Optical Society of America