Electro-Optical DSP of Tera Operations per Second and Beyond (Extended Abstract)

We present a vector-by-matrix multiplier architecture incorporating the high potential of optical computing within electronics. This architecture stems from advances in optical switching technology, optical communication, and laser on silicon, and overcomes previous bottlenecks implied by the speed of transferring information to the optical vector-by-matrix multiplier. Based on this architecture, we present in detail a feasible electro-optical DSP coprocessor that can obtain more than 16-Tera integer operations per second. The use of the new architecture for several principal DSP applications is detailed, showing a significant improvement of at least two orders of magnitudes, over existing DSP technologies. Examples of possible applications, including motion estimation engine, string matching, and geometry engine systems, are provided. In addition, the architecture enables an improvement of previous solutions to bounded NP-complete problems by extensively reducing the size of the solver, while preserving an efficient computation time.