An Optical Content-Adressable Parallel Processor for Fast Searching and Retrieving

Associative processing based on content-addressable memories has been argued to be the natural solution for non-numerical information processing applications. Unfortunately, the implementation requirements of these architectures using conventional electronic technology have been very cost prohibitive, and therefore associative processors have not been realized. Instead, software methods that emulate the behavior of associative processing have been promoted and mapped onto conventional location-addressable systems. This however, does not bring about the natural parallelism of associative processing, namely the ability to access many data words simultaneously.