Abstract

There exist two distinct optical technologies with potential for data processing: integrated optics (IO) and free-space optics (FSO). The IO techno logy is well suited for performing optical nonlinear interactions and electro-optical control operations. As a planar technology, IO can implement one-dimensional parallelism quite naturally, but not so well two-dimensional parallelism. The FSO technology on the other hand, is very well suited for two-dimensional parallelism. But in terms of nonlinear interactions FSO is lagging behind IO.

© 1987 Optical Society of America