Optical error-correction coding encoder and decoder: design considerations

Novel all-optical parallel implementations of encoder and decoder systems for error detection and correction with linear codes are proposed. The key components are optical vector–matrix multipliers and optical lookup tables. Evaluation is made of the overall system throughput and the hardware requirement with a case of a simple (7, 4) Hamming error-detection coding for a two-dimensional picture of 1000 × 1000 pixels with near-future ferroelectric liquid-crystal devices, which results in a best throughput of approximately 5.6 × 1010 pixels/s and a size of 1 cm × 1 cm with a combination of time- and space-division techniques.