HYBRID OPTICAL PROCESSOR FOR SYSTEMS OF NONLINEAR EQUATIONS

A hybrid optical processor to solve a system of nonlinear equations is presented. The proposed system has been based on the Bimodal Optical Computer (BOC). Two algorithms based on the BOC are presented and comp ared. One algorithm solves the resulting system of linear equations ap proximately and the second solves the sytem exactly within a specified accuracy. The first is shown to result in a smaller number of iterati ons. The effect of errors from the I/O devices on the system is analyz ed. Three factors affecting the convergence speed are considered: the initial values of the solution, the norm of the solution residue and t he scale factor. It is shown that the number of iterations can be mini mized when the norm of the residue is as small as possible, and the sc ale factor is equal to the ratio of the norm-of the coefficient matrix to the norm of the residue. This processor has a speed advantage over digital processors for large size systems of equations.