Abstract

Among the multiple-valued ogic systems, trinary logic appears to be the most promising in terms of the number of logic levels and storage complexity. To implement multiple-valued logic, various optical computing techniques, such as threshold logic, spatial filtering, truth table look-up processing, and polarization-encoded optical shadow-casting (POSO),¹ have been suggested. Among these techniques, the lensless POSC technique has been found to exploit completely the parallelism of optics in performing logic operations. The POSC scheme has already been used to design a binary logic-based multiprocessor.² To exploit the potential of multiple-valued logic in optical computing, in our current paper we extend the scope of POSC systems and design a multiple-valued logic-based optical multiprocessor. As an illustration, we furnish the design of a trinary logic-based multiprocessor that can perform parallel trinary full addition and full subtraction. The POSC algorithm presented in this paper uses fixed source and detector patterns and yields a minimized design.

© 1992 Optical Society of America