Spatial Light Rebroadcaster Architecture Study

There is a need for a processor to perform real-time automatic target classification ATC that is compact and consumes little electrical power. Optical processors have the potential to provide the needed computational power in a small package. Substantial efforts have been expended in the development of spatial light modulators SLMs to meet the ATC requirements, but performance achieved thus far is still lacking. A new class of optical devices, spatial light rebroadcasters SLRs have been developed recently with potential performance far exceeding current SLMs. Instead of modulating the input light field, SLR absorbs the incident radiation and re-emits when triggered to do so. The triggering can be accomplished with an optical signal which also carries spatial information. The storage capability and the relationship between the intensities of the incident input, triggering readout and emitted output radiations can be used to perform parallel processing of two-dimensional spatial data. In this report, several optical processing architectures were developed and five of the most promising were analyzed in detail. In addition, preliminary experiments were performed to evaluate the hardware required for two of the architectures.