Design of a pipelined optoelectronic processor

Recent rapid advances in technologies such as modulators, vertical cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) arrays, smart-pixel processing elements (PEs) integrating electronic circuitry with optical inputloutput channels, and micro-optic components has allowed the construction of parallel optoelectronic computing systems. These systems utilise the high bandwidth, high density and global nature of optical communication paths to overcome some of the limitations of conventional interconnections. Globally interconnected parallel optical processors are suitable for applications such as sorting, FFTs, and signal processing, and high level image processing. The latter is of interest in our laboratory, specifically with its application to machine vision. However, our system, to be described below, is a general purpose machine due to the programmability of the processing elements (PEs) and by reconfiguring optical interconnections. We can therefore implement a variety of operations on our system: image processing, arithmetic, matrix operations, sorting, and signal processing.