Principles and construction of MSD adder in ternary optical computer

The two remarkable features of ternary values and a massive unit with thousands bits of parallel computation will make the ternary optical computer (TOC) with modified signed-digit (MSD) adder more powerful and efficient than ever before for numerical calculations. Based on the decrease-radix design presented previously, a TOC can satisfy either a user requiring huge capacity for data calculations or one with a moderate amount of data, if it is equipped with a prepared adder. Furthermore, with the application of pipelined operations and the proposed data editing technique, the efficiency of the prepared adder can be greatly improved, so that each calculated result can be obtained almost within one clock cycle. It is hopeful that by employing a MSD adder, users will be able to enter a new dimension with the creation of a new multiplier, new divider, as well as new matrix operator in a TOC in the near future.