Impact of technological advances and architectural insights on the design of optical computers

Abstract

Communication problems such as interconnection bandwidth, clock skew, and connectivity are restricting computational throughput. Bandwidth and clock skew problems limit the speed and add to the design complexity of a processor. Constrained connectivity forces much of the speed of a processor to be used to compensate for the limited number of interconnections. . Philosophically, the large bandwidth, innate parallelism and non-interfering propagation of optics offer mechanisms for overcoming these communication problems. The difficulty in exploiting these capabilities has been the absence of suitable optical logic and memory devices. Advances in optical nonlinearities offer the possibility of cascadable optical logic gates that are competitive with electronics. Advances in computer architecture can be used to simplify the optical memory requirements and utilize the large bandwidth, parallel, non-interfering communications of optics.