Digital Optical Computer Global Interconnect Algorithm Study

Optical computer technology has demonstrated the potential to offer extremely high computational rates at significant power saving over conventional semi-conductor electronics technology. The leverage over power requirement is extended by the use of global interconnect geometries which allow a larger fan-in per photon than the parallel architectures under study at the time of project inception. The purpose of this project is to study and formulate candidate digital computation primitives to be applied to optical global interconnect geometries to recommend a Global Digital Optical Computer architecture. This project is directed at expanding and enhancing the work completed in a parallel digital optical computer project that is currently underway. The goal is to implement a digital optical computer that surpasses the performance offered by strictly parallel interconnect geometries. This study will revolve about two architectural concerns optical and computational. The current parallel approaches can be extended to global in discrete steps of complexity. The central principle applied to achieving global interconnects is the Fourrier transform properties of any optical system. The interconnect geometries will utilize the autocoherence properties of the laser array emitters however, all of the emitters will be specified to be mutually incoherent to frustrate different channels from interferometrically coupling at the detector. author