AN APPROACH TO OPTICAL PARALLEL DATA-TRANSMISSION USING OPTICAL SYMBOLIC SUBSTITUTION

This paper proposes a flexible parallel optical data transmission syst em as follows. The data transmission itself is executed in parallel by utilizing the super-parallelism of the light. In addition, the addres s information which is necessary for the transmission is superposed on the transmitted data. By those schemes, the capacity of the individua l transmission channel as well as the number of transmission channels in the system are made variable. This paper describes first the princi ple of parallel optical data transmission. It is shown that the symbol ic substitution (SS) is useful in the superposition and separation of the address information, which are the basic operations of the system. SS is a parallel and position-invariant logical operation. An experim ental system is constructed by the SS technique using the computer-gen erated Fourier hologram (CGFH). A result of experiment is shown for th e single-channel parallel transmission of two-dimensional data. Thus, it is shown that the flexible transmission system, where the capacity of the individual transmission channel as well as the number of transm ission channels are variable, can be realized by the proposed transmis sion scheme.