<title>Free-space optical interconnect and processing demonstrators with arrays of light-emitting thyristors</title>

Abstract

The significant progress which as been made in the development of differential pairs and arrays of differential pairs of light-emitting thyristors has made the construction of optical computing systems with high speed interconnections a realistic possibility. In this paper we review our work on the practical implementation of these optoelectronic transceiver devices in systems and demonstrate most of the basic functionalities necessary to build a primitive digital parallel optical processor. We demonstrate the transcription of digital optical data between cascaded single elements and between 8 by 8 arrays of completely- depleted optical thyristor differential pairs. We also show results of digital optical logic NAND, NOR, AND, OR, NOT operations, logic plane to logic plane imaging with a diffractive fan-out and parallel digital data input with a computer controlled liquid crystal micro- display. As an example of a sub-system module which has reasonable complexity we focus on a demonstrator platform which combines optical thyristor logic planes, polarization- selective diffractive optical elements, liquid crystal variable retarders and large diameter gradient index lenses, and successfully demonstrate dynamically reconfigurable nearest neighbor interconnects. We conclude by discussing the future system performances in the light of system scalability.