Optical logic elements for high-throughput optical processors

Abstract

An analysis is made of the current state and problems as well as prospects of the development of optical logic elements and threshold light amplifiers for high-throughput computing. An analysis is made of the specific case of a variant of an optical processor capable of 1013–1014 arithmetic operations per second under conditions of pipelined processing of two-dimensional arrays of multidigit binary operands. The basic requirements which must be satisfied by parameters and characteristics of optical logic elements in such a processor are identified.