Design of optical computing systems and demonstrations

Given that the parallelism of presently perceived digital-optical devices is unlikely to be dramatically larger than that achievable electronically, it is the combination of 2-D parallelism and interconnect freedom through 3-D that gives optics its potential advantages. Progress towards an optical CLIP, cellular logic image processor, is described. A diode-laser driven all-optical circuit has been constructed, run at a millisecond cycle time, and used to perform four logic processes. This circuit, in parallel format, would form the heart of a cellular logic image processor. The device technology has demonstrated 15 × 15 parallelism and predicted parallelism in excess of 10⁴ cm^-2. CLIP simulations and tolerance studies have been used to optimize the circuitry, develop algorithms and establish the object codes that will be used for primitive function tasks.