Abstract

Recently, quite strong nonlinear optical configurations such as MQW have been invented. As a consequence, optical logic components with reasonable parameters are now feasible, but that is not enough to justify the development of a digital optical computer. The natural parallelism of optical instruments provides the impetus for developing a highly parallel digital optical computer. The optical technology is not so far behind the electronics technology as one might suspect. We show how varieties of computer subsystems can be implemented relatively easily by classical optical hardware.

© 1986 Optical Society of America

Shift-connected SIMD array architectures for digital optical computing systems, with algorithms for numerical transforms and partial differential equations

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