Abstract

The mass parallelism offered by optical interconnection networks is exploited in the construction of optical parallel processors. Optical symbolic substitution is one form of parallel processing, which uses only space-invariant interconnections. It performs the search and replace for a set of specified spatial patterns in parallel upon an entire input matrix.¹ Symbolic substitution systems are being proposed for application in areas such as image processing or digital arithmetics, where it is desired to have a large data base operated on in parallel.

© 1989 Optical Society of America