Fabrication Considerations For Acousto-Optic Systolic Processors

The number of multiplications per second and fabrication issues associated with several different acousto-optic systolic processors are discussed and the flexibility in the operations achievable by format control are briefly reviewed. Emphasis is given to the effects of divergence of the optical input beam. Various input sources and interconnection schemes are considered. These include: fiber and GRIN optics, multi-channel acousto-optic cells and individually collimated laser diodes. Quantitative theoretical and experimental data are provided. A new architecture using spatial-multiplexing of the input sources and frequency-multiplexing of the acousto-optic cell data is described and used for handling bipolar and complex-valued matrix and vector elements.