Abstract

Optics is a natural context in which to contemplate the implementation of connection processors. The highly communicative nature of the processing elements in these machines begs for connection mechanisms that do not interact except at (or near) the processing element. This is particularly true in systems which are globally interconnected. Lightwaves do not interact except under the attendance of a material medium, and then only weakly. Furthermore, optics lends itself very well to parallel computation. Lenses, holograms, and other optical elements can easily manipulate large arrays of data in a parallel fashion. It may be possible to implement connection machines using continuous field optical architectures. These devices offer the inherent parallelism of propagating waves and an information density in principle dictated by the wavelength of light and the quality of the bulk optical elements. Few components are needed to construct a relatively large equivalent network. Various associative memories based on optical resonators have been demonstrated in the literature. These memories recall stored information through a reconstruction of injected partial information. The memory is the first realized example of an optical device connection machine function implemented with this kind of architecture. Another example is the novelty filter.

© 1986 Optical Society of America