1.

APPLICATION AREAS OF OPTICAL COMPUTING

TECHNOLOGY
Application-specific devices, such as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical
correlators have been designed to use the principles of optical computing. The most
obvious application for optical-computing technology is in board-to-board interconnects
on large-scale parallel processors. In such interconnects the smart-pixel arrays are
driven by electronic commands from the parallel processor but use optical switching in
free space to do the interconnection.

2. CONCLUSION

Research in optical computing has opened up new possibilities in several fields related
to high performance computing, high-speed communications. To design algorithms that
execute applications faster, the specific properties of optics must be considered, such as
their ability to exploit massive parallelism, and global interconnections. As
optoelectronic and smart pixel devices mature, software development will have a major
impact in the future and the ground rules for the computing may have to be rewritten.