ACOUSTOOPTICAL WIDE-BAND CORRELATOR SYSTEM - DESIGN, IMPLEMENTATION, AND EVALUATION

We describe the design and development of an acousto-optical wideband correlator that we integrated into a digital signal-processing system testbed. We report its measured performance and compare it with variou s theoretical performance measures, one of which compares the optical system with an equivalent efficient digital correlator. The measured p erformance of the optical system was 20 to 70 times that of a VAX 6410 computer using a fast-Fourier-transform correlation algorithm and a v ector processor, even though the electronic interface system limited t he performance of the optical system to less than 0.5% of its potentia l. We also compare the system with commercially available digital sign al-processing boards.