An approach to optical parallel data transmission using optical symbolic substitution

This paper proposes a flexible parallel optical data transmission system as follows. the data transmission itself is executed in parallel by utilizing the super-parallelism of the light. In addition, the address information which is necessary for the transmission is super-posed on the transmitted data. By those schemes, the capacity of the individual transmission channel as well as the number of transmission channels in the system are made variable. This paper describes first the principle of parallel optical data transmission. It is shown that the symbolic substitution (SS) is useful in the superposition and separation of the address information, which are the basic operations of the system. SS is a parallel and positioninvariant logical operation. an experimental system is constructed by the SS technique using the computer-generated Fourier hologram (CGFH). A result of experiment is shown for the single-channel parallel transmission of two-dimensional data. Thus, it is shown that the flexible transmission system, where the capacity of the individual transmission channel as well as the number of transmission channels are variable, can be realized by the proposed transmission scheme.