Abstract

A potential advantage of communicating information optically rather than electrically is the ease with which non-local interconnection paths may be set-up. The radix 2 is a general purpose interconnection pattern of potential use in optical computing architectures. A 2-dimensional array of nodes is interconnected to nearest neighbours, neighbours 2 pixels distant, 4 pixels away, etc in both the vertical and horizontal directions. Each node may be a processing cell implemented using smart pixel technology. This interconnection scheme minimises the number of cycles required to solve algorithms involving recursive doubling such as the bitonic sort and fast Fourier transforms.

© 1995 Optical Society of America