Deformable Mirror Nearest Neighbor Optical Digital Computer

Abstract

Many problems are efficiently computed on nearest neighbor connected machines because they involve regular grids or grids that may be envisaged as distortions from regular. Examples include image processing and finite differences and finite elements that dominate engineering and scientific computation. Previously, I proposed an optical nearest neighbor machine concept with 5-bit accuracy. The simple design in this paper uses residue number arithmetic and two deformable mirror arrays of 1000 x 1000 elements to achieve 15 million operations per second with 32-bit accuracy. I assume that an array may be set in 8 ms. Duplication of equipment by 64 times enables one billion operations per second because perfect parallelism is achievable with residue numbers and nearest neighbor concepts. It is anticipated that the increased use of deformable mirror devices in computer peripherals will advance the technology to the point where designs such as that proposed will be practical. The proposed scheme appears to be superior to outer product and optical modulo schemes for nearest neighbor computation.