PERSPECTIVES ON THE APPLICATION OF OPTICAL MATRIX PROCESSORS

Researchers have proposed a great number of optical matrix processing architectures and devices, each having significant advantages and disa dvantages. However, no general metrics have been established to compar e processors, and there has been little work to implement optical matr ix processors for specific applications. In this article, we examine t he range of proposed optical matrix processors both to determine the m ost promising classes of applications and, by establishing performance criteria, to select the best architectures and algorithms for these a pplications. This examination concludes that the greatest current pote ntial is for analog optical matrix-vector processors to analyze slowly varying or invariant systems with high data throughput rates. (C) 199 6 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.