Abstract

The promise of optical information processing is a general purpose optical computer capable of programmable parallel operation on a large two-dimensional data field. The lack of high performance two-dimensional spatial light modulators (SLMs)(1), however, has hindered this development. Recently, systolic matrix architectures(2) have been suggested as a means of rapidly and efficiently processing two-dimensional data. The optical implementation of these architectures requires a high performance SLM with the property that data can be serially transferred without loss across the modulator. The multi-channel acousto-optic Bragg cell is an ideal SLM for realizing two-dimensional optical systolic parallel matrix processing.

© 1985 Optical Society of America