Design and Construction of a Programmable Optical 16x16 Array Processor

There have been a number of significant advances in digital optical computing research over recent years. Experimental demonstrations of optical restoring logic1, the lock-and clock control of data flow2, a programmable optical logic unit3, optical switching networks4, and parallel logic modules5 have shown that the basic building blocks for a parallel digital optical computing system now exist. This paper describes recent work carried out at Heriot-Watt University in which such a demonstration optical processor has been constructed.