Programmable Optical Arithmetic Logic Unit + Optical Associative Processior

[iajze...@gmail.com]

It is about time this technology went into production. Speed of light
computing for all!
Getting optical processors into production will be a value
proposition..
It will involve a radical restructuring and completely different
research and fabrication, but it will be worth it.
What will the children of the world get up to with speed of light
optical processors / supercomputers in their Classmate PC's.?
Programmable Optical Arithmetic Logic Unit + Optical Associative
Processing

We could all have optical processors in our laptops! Technology has
advanced and the time has come!

Programmable Optical Arithmetic Logic Unit

http://www.google.com/patents?id=sMYlAAAAEBAJ
Background of the Invention.
USA Patent Number 5249144
The invention relates generally to optical information processing,
and, in particular, to an optical crossbar apparatus for performing
parallel optical logic and arithmetic operations and including
programmable residue arithmetic functions.
There is a fundamental difference between optical circuits, in which
the information carriers are photons, and electronic circuits, where
the carriers are electrons. In the former case, the carriers do not
interact with each other, while in the latter they do. This means that
in optical devices, there exist interconnect possibilities that do not
exist with electronic hardware, in particular, interconnected parallel
architectures which permit digital arithmetic and logic operations to
be performed in a completely parallel, single step process. After the
inputs are switched on, the output appears in the time it takes a
photon to transit the device. No faster computation time is possible

A programmable optical arithmetic/logic device employs a first and
second plurality of positionally encoded optical light paths. For
arithmetic operations, these light paths represent residue numbers.
The arithmetic/logic device includes first and second reordering units
which are responsive to a third and fourth plurality of light sources
serving to select one of a plurality of arithmetic or logic operations
to be performed by the arithmetic/logic device. The arithmetic/logic
device further employs an optical arithmetic/logic unit which is
identically constructed for all of the selectable arithmetic/logic
operations and which implements an optical table look-up function to
obtain the desired output. Finally, the arithmetic/logic device used
an output reordering device to reorder the output of the arithmetic/
logic unit depending upon the originally selected arithmetic/logic
operation. For arithmetic operations, the final output is provided as
an output residue number representation.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/5221v26378452855/

An optical content-addressable parallel processor for fast searching
and retrieving
Book Series Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Publisher Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
ISSN 0302-9743 (Print) 1611-3349 (Online)
Volume Volume 505/1991
Book PARLE '91 Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe
DOI 10.1007/BFb0035091
Copyright 1991
ISBN 978-3-540-54151-6
Category Submitted Presentations
DOI 10.1007/BFb0035114
Pages 338-354
Subject Collection Computer Science
SpringerLink Date Monday, April 10, 2006

Ahmed Louri1

(1) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University
of Arizona, 85721 Tucson, Arizona
Abstract
Associative processing based on content-addressable memories has been
argued to be the natural solution for non-numerical information
processing applications. Unfortunately, the implementation
requirements of these architectures using conventional electronic
technology have been very cost prohibitive, and therefore associative
processors have not been realized. Instead, software methods that
emulate the behavior of associative processing have been promoted and
mapped onto conventional location-addressable systems. This however,
does not bring about the natural parallelism of associative
processing, namely the ability to access many data words
simultaneously.
The inherently parallel nature and high speed of optics, combined with
the recent technological advancements in optical logic, storage and
interconnect devices are raising hopes for practical realization of
highly parallel optical computing systems. This paper presents the
principles of designing an optical content-addressable parallel
processor, called OCAPP, for the efficient support of high speed
symbolic computing. The architecture is designed to fully exploit the
parallelism an high speed of optics. Several parallel algorithms are
mapped onto OCAPP in bit-parallel as well as word-parallel fashion,
resulting in efficient symbolic algorithms with execution times
dependent only on the precision of the operands and not on the problem
size. This makes OCAPP very suitable for applications where the number
of data sets to be operated on is high e.g., massively parallel
processing. A preliminary optical implementation of the architecture
using currently available optical components is also presented.
This research was supported by an NSF Grant No. MIP-8909216.