Symbolic substitution modified signed-digit optical adder.

A high-accuracy fixed-point optical adder that operates in parallel on many long words and that uses a pipelined correlator architecture is described. A symbolic substitution algorithm with the modified signed-digit number representation is used to perform fixed-point additions with limited carries. A new set of substitution rules and encodings is developed to combine the recognition and substitution steps into one correlation operation. This reduces hardware requirements, improves throughput by reducing the space-bandwidth product needed, and reduces latency (the delay between when data enter the processor and when the final output is available) by a factor of 2. This algorithm and our new modified signed-digit encodings and substitution rules improve the performance of other correlator and noncorrelator optical numeric computing architectures.