Abstract

A holographic plate that can produce N⁴ free-space optical interconnections, as proposed by H. J. Caulfield, can be incorporated into a special purpose processor. This will allow parallel calculations to be accomplished on a massive scale at a very low energy cost. The initial test system, which uses a 256 × 256-pixel spatial light modulator (SLM) as the dynamic array element and an N⁴ holographic plate containing multiple masks of the SLM, is designed for ease of use and effective quantitative evaluations. For this proposed system the holographic masks must be capable of 300 lines/in. resolution. Furthermore, the processing technique for the plate must provide for a minimum of scattering to reduce crosstalk. The system must eliminate as much noise and crosstalk as possible to reduce the number of error correction processing cycles. With fewer forced repeated cycles due to error correction, the average energy per calculation performed with such a system can be greatly reduced, even to unprecedented levels.

© 1991 Optical Society of America