OPTICAL-PROCESSING PARADIGMS FOR ELECTRONIC-COMPUTERS

Even if electronics were to reach some fundamental limitations because of natural law, the authors state that photonics is not ready to repl ace electronics as the new platform for digital data processing. On th e other hand, they say, photonics can greatly enhance the performance of electronic computers. Photonics already contributes to the fields o f data storage and data communication. The missing link, however, betw een storage and communication is data processing. The authors describe a special optoelectronic architecture that can support-data processin g. In the context of their research, the authors discuss three computi ng paradigms: Analog optical processing, which entails analog operatio ns on sets of analog data obtained by a camera lens, for example. Digi tal optical processing, which involves the use of light to perform dig ital logic. Analog-digital hybrid optical processing, which involves h ybrid techniques and systems that can process both types of data.