Single Element 2-DIMENSIONAL Acousto-Optic Deflectors Design, Fabrication and Implementation for Digital Optical Computing

With the need to develop very fast computers compared to the conventional digital chip based systems, the future is very bright for optical based signal processing. Attention has turned to a different application of optics utilizing mathematical operations, in which case operations are numerical, sometimes discrete, and often algebraic in nature. Interest has been so vigorous that many view it as a small revolution in optics whereby optical signal processing is beginning to encompass what many frequently describe as optical computing. The term is fully intended to imply close comparison with the operations performed by scientific digital computers. Most present computer intensive problem solving processors rely on a common set of linear equations found in numerical matrix algebra. Recently, considerable research focused on the use of systolic array, which can operate at high speeds with great efficiency. This approach addresses the acousto-optic digital and analog arrays utilizing three dimensional optical interconnect technology. In part I of this dissertation the first single element 2-dimensional (2-D) acousto-optic deflector was designed, fabricated and incorporated into an optical 3 x 3 vector-vector or matrix-matrix multiplier system. This single element deflector is used as a outer-product device. The input vectors are addressed by electronic means and the outer product matrix is displayed as a 2-D array of optical (laser) pixels. In part II of this work a multichannel single element 2-D deflector was designed, fabricated and implemented into a Programmable Logic Array (PLA) optical computing system. This system can be used for: word equality detection, free space optical interconnections, half adder optical system implementation. The PLA system described in this dissertation has capability of word equality detection. The 2-D multichannel deflector that was designed and fabricated is capable of comparing 16 x 16 words every 316 nanoseconds. Each word is 8-bits long. Using only the diagonal intersection of the X and Y channels, 810 MGbits/sec of data in the X channels are compared with 810 MGbits/sec of data in the Y channels. With further development in the area of electronic drive circuitry to utilize the full aperture of the existing 2-D device, 12.9 Gbits of data can be compared every second.