A new graduate course on optical computing

A new optical computing course offered at the graduate level is described. The term "optical computing" used here refers to the design of digital comp uter system modules and interconnections using optical/optoelectronic techn ologies. The course has been offered in the College of Computer Science and Engineering (CCSE), by both the computer engineering (COE) and the informa tion and computer science (ICS) departments while the author was at King Fa hd University of Petroleum & minerals (KFUPM). In essence, the course was i ntended for a wide audience, That is, students from other disciplines, such as the electrical engineering (EE) and systems engineering (SE), can regis ter for the course as an elective. The course main topics are: motivation a nd background for optical computing; subsystems for optical computing that discusses the different types of optical interconnection networks, optical memory, optical arithmetic/matrix computations and related algorithms; and architectural models of computations where optical LAN's/MAN's, optical dat aflow computers, optical cellular automata, and optical neural networks are discussed.