An optic or opto-electronic processor architecture dedicated to linear algebra: critical study

For a few years, several optical architectures dedicated to matrix computation have been studied by the 'optical computing' community. In spite of their attractive features and the computational power that they will offer, these structures have not yet been considered by the electronic machine designers. A demonstration model of an opto-electronic processor will be realised and implanted in a computing system environment. From a few reflections about the attributes of the optical intensity and about the state of the art in the technology, the author derives a particular architecture. The main alternatives relative to the mode of operations are presented in the context of solving some linear algebra problems. The main advantages of the processor are explained in the case of solving linear equations. The difficulties related to the analog opto-electronic nature of the system are presented, and some solutions to overcome them are discussed. Interesting application prospects are found in the field of image processing on workstations. For this purpose, the opto-electronic processor could accelerate the matrix computation tasks and thus, allow for the treatment by the only workstation of 'real time' problems demanding a relatively high computing power.