Error-correction schemes for volume optical memories.

An optically addressed Reed-Solomon parallel decoder has been designed and fabricated for onedimensional parallel access optical memories. The [15, 9] Reed-Solomon decoder operates on 60 parallel optical inputs and has been demonstrated at a data rate of 300 megabits/s. Compared with equivalent serial decoding solutions, this decoder is shown to be more area efficient and offers reduced latency. An extension to two-dimensional error correction using both the parallel and serial strategies is presented, and comparisons are made in terms of parallelism, page rate, and information rate for the two architectures. A hybrid optoelectronic decoding architecture that uses optical finite-field matrix-vector multipliers is given and is shown to offer error correction at large block sizes and aggregate data rates exceeding 10(12) bits/s.