New Optical DSPs With Tera-ops Performance

GFD writes: "The EETimes has a story about a new class of hybrid digital/optical signal processors that are programmable and offer tera-ops performance potential for relatively low cost and power requirements. No fundamental breakthroughs but rather a very slick use of existing optical networking components to create a programmable optical processor that looks to the rest of the world like a single chip digital signal processor. Elegant and impressive if they can deliver."

Comments

Their tera-ops are a little different

[mmacdona86]

since they are not actually processing the signal digitally. They are slickly converting it to a light signal, doing the heavy lifting with optical elements, which is essentially analog processing, and then converting it back to a digital signal. A real valuable short cut for those applications where you can translate what needs to be done to optical elements, but not anything like a general-purpose tera-ops digital computer.

[summary] Fast FFTs, DCTs, etc.

[grmoc]

Basically, for those of you too impatient to read the article, it works by using VSCELs (lasers) through conventional optics, and into a high-speed collector. The lasers can work at up to 1 Ghz, and the processing is done (it seems) in analog by the optics. Acquisition of the date is performed by the collector, which operates at 10 Ghz.

The theory is that optics can perform FFTs, DCTs, etc for you at the speed of light, and there are many applications that need these operatons done. Any other processing, correlation, etc would be done by conventional, low-performance DSPs.

They also say that their current model works at 20 T ops/sec at 20 watts, and list what would be required of typical DSPs, etc down to ASICS.

Seems promising, but it is still a long way away from a nice optical CPU.