Abstract

The electron-trapping (ET) materials are optical storage materials developed by Quantex. When ET materials are exposed to visible light (e.g., 488 nm), electrons from the ground state are excited and then captured by thermally stable traps. Subsequent exposure to IR light (e.g., 1064 nm) excites and releases the trapped electrons to the ground state with the emission of orange-to-red light. The ET materials are capable of performing multiplication, addition, and subtraction within a dynamic range covering four orders of magnitude. The orange emission intensity is proportional to the product of the blue write-in intensity and the IR read-out intensity. The addition and subtraction operations are performed by increasing and decreasing the number of trapped electrons. An ET thin film can be used as an optical mask to perform matrix vector multiplication. Furthermore, the ET thin film has an inherent capability for summing, subtracting, and storing optical data, in addition to multiplication. This extra capability, which is not commonly found in spatial light modulators, will be used for the optical formation of an interconnection matrix (prescribed learning).

© 1990 Optical Society of America