Optical heteroassociative memory using spatial light rebroadcasters.

A new device, a spatial light rebroadcaster, is described that can have optical disk resolution and high speed. Experimental results demonstrate resolution, speed, linearity, logic operation, and arithmetic computation. The device is suitable for optical computing, in particular for memory systems. Optical masking for controlling memory recall and 100 x 100 matrix-vector multiplication are demonstrated. A one pass optical heteroassociative memory system was assembled that uses an optical outer product formulation to store associated 32-bit vectors. Recall is achieved by optical matrix-vector multiplication. The results show the suitability of these devices for memory systems in optical computers.