Dynamic Optically Reconfigurable Gate Array

Abstract

Optically reconfigurable gate arrays (ORGAs) can readily enable both fast reconfiguration and numerous reconfiguration contexts using an optical holographic memory and optical wide-band reconfiguration connections. Such devices present the possibility of large virtual gate-count very large scale integrations (VLSIs). However, the real gate-count of the VLSI part of the devices is too small–only 80. Moreover, the reconfiguration speed is not sufficiently fast: 16 to 20 µs. For those reasons, this paper clarifies the architecture issues and presents a new architecture of a dynamic optically reconfigurable gate array (DORGA) to improve them. In addition, a comparison is made of results obtained using the previously proposed devices and DORGAs under the same environment. Finally, this paper presents a new design of a 51,272-gate-count DORGA with the new architecture.