ERROR-CORRECTION SCHEMES FOR VOLUME OPTICAL MEMORIES

An optically addressed Reed-Solomon parallel decoder has been designed and fabricated for one-dimensional parallel access optical memories. The [15, 9] Reed-Solomon decoder operates on 60 parallel optical input s and has been demonstrated at a data rate of 300 megabits/s. Compared with equivalent serial decoding solutions, this decoder is shown to b e more area efficient and offers reduced latency. An extension to two- dimensional error correction using both the parallel and serial strate gies is presented, and comparisons are made in terms of parallelism, p age rate, and information rate for the two architectures. A hybrid opt oelectronic decoding architecture that uses optical finite-field matri x-vector multipliers is given and is shown to offer error correction a t large block sizes and aggregate data rates exceeding 10(12) bits/s. (C) 1995 Optical Society of America