PARALLEL OPTICAL QUATERNARY SIGNED-DIGIT MULTIPLICATION AND ITS USE FOR MATRIX-VECTOR OPERATION

A parallel algorithm for multiplication of quaternary signed digit (QS D) numbers is developed in this paper. The number of minterms is signi ficant ly minimized due to the symmetric encoding involved in the algo rithm. With a shared content-addressable memory (CAM), the implementat ion requires a fixed number of minterms for operands of arbitrary size . An incoherent correlator based optical CAM processor can be used as the basic unit for QSD multiplication, and preliminary experiment is d emonstrated. Large scale matrix-vector multiplication call be performe d in a pipelined iterative architecture using a limited number of mult ipliers.