Superfast Optically-Based DSP Announced

dawgnut writes "An Israeli venture-funded startup has announced a digital signal processor chip that uses optical connections rather than silicon transistors. The result is a very fast chip with massive throughput for calculating fast fourier transforms that wastes very small amounts of power as heat. Interesting applications (or frightening ones depending on where you come down on the security vs. privacy thing) for remote sensors, biometrics and homeland security stuff." The prototype being showcased is rather large, but Lenslet is hoping to have it shrunk down to a chip within five years. Update: 10/31 00:22 GMT by CN : Whoops, we ran this yesterday. Mea culpa.

Comments

Make it smaller within the next few years

[Atmchicago]

An old soviet joke was as follows: And yet another achievement by soviet science - they have perfected the world's largest microchip!

Re:Make it smaller within the next few years

[bobdotorg]

and I believe it's called Itanium.

Flashlight Fun

[Thargok]

I can see the LAN parties now... "Will you stop it with the flashlight?!!!! Why did I buy that window kit?"

I have to admit

[NightWulf]

For such a small nation, with access to a hell of a lot less funding than american conglomerates. These Israeli companies sure do make some intresting inventions. From supercomputers, to genetic engineering, etc. etc.

Re:I have to admit

[rindeee]

Perhaps they develope military technologies BECAUSE they aren't popular and perhaps they aren't popular BECAUSE they're the only democracy in the middle-east AND they've been at odds with the Arabs for the past several thousand years.

Re:I have to admit

[Arker]

Perhaps they develope military technologies BECAUSE they aren't popular and perhaps they aren't popular BECAUSE they're the only democracy in the middle-east AND they've been at odds with the Arabs for the past several thousand years.

If by "they" you mean Jews, you're wrong. It was Europe where they were at odds for thousands of years, the Muslim world was a relative safe haven for Jews until very recently.

If by "they" you mean the Israeli government, it's existed for decades, not thousands of years.

And, of course, the fact that "they" are unpopular with the Arab world at the moment couldn't have anything to do with the occupation, land grabbing, apartheid system, and open aspirations of ethnic cleansing of the Israeli government, which pretends to speak for Jews as a whole even though many disagree wholeheartedly with its policies. That would be far too obvious.

Re:I have to admit

[tho 1234]

Give me a break about being unpopular "because they are the only democracy in the middle east". I can't understand how people buy BS like that or "the terrorists attacked us because they are jealous of us". Its really incredible how many people believe rhetoric like this, despite there being no rational justification for it, or any evidence to support it. Take it for what it is, mindless rhetoric to stop people from questioning, trying to understand a very complex geopolitical conflict, or thinking for themselves. - Have you ever thought about the fact that Israel is also the only nuclear power in the middle east, has by far the most advanced military in the region, and frequently uses its military power to humiliate its neighbours? Or how about the millions of people living in poverty stricken refugee camps because of Israel's illegal occupation of territory? Certainly the thousands of civilian deaths they have caused has nothing to do with it...No, none of that has anything to do with the problem, its all because the freedom-hatin' Arabs can't stand democracy.... right... 2- The Jews have not been at odds with Arabs for thousands of years. (though that is probably true about Jews and the Europeans) They were conquered in the first century AD, and weren't there for most of the next 2000 years. Until about 1800 there were any Jews in the middle east, and the few that were there coexisted with the Arabs peacefully. Soon the Zionist movement started and many more immigrated to the area, and they also got along well. It wasn't until the founding of Israel after world war 2 (due to the European's guilt over the Holocaust), carving up land that previously belonged to others, followed by wars against virtually every one of its neighbours and the displacement of millions of refugees, that the current conflict with the Arab countries started. I'm not taking sides in this dispute, but get your facts right and try thinking for yourself instead of simplifying everything down to one line justifications.

Re:I have to admit

[Froug]

Israeli companies also make a lot of fraudulent claims.
If all claims were to be believed, then the Israelis have had optical and quantum computers for half a decade, can break any encryption, have unbreakable encryption, and an AI in junior high.

I have no doubt that some Israeli companies do develop interesting innovations, but not every sensational technology press release that finds its way on to Slashdot is entirely honest.

Memory is irrelevant for this kind of "processor"

[Anonymous Coward]

This is NOT a Harvard architecture part - this isn't fetching instructions from RAM and executing them, like a regular DSP would.

Think of this more like an FPGA - you have a device that is configured for a specific processing algorithm, and data is fed in at wire rate and processed at wire rate.

An example of how a device like this might be used may be in order:
I'm trying to find a radar pulse buried in the noise coming in from my receiver. I want to know the phase delay of the radar pulse - how long from when I sent it till I got it back.

Now, I know what my radar pulse looks like as it goes out. I know that any reflection is going to consist of versions of that pulse shape, delayed and of varying strengths. So what I do is called a correlation - the easiest way to think of this is to imagine having 2 transparencies, one of my outgoing pulse, and one of the incoming signal. Now, I hold them up to the light, and slide the incoming signal across the reference pulse until things match up - that's the point of maximum correlation, and that give me the delay of the signal.

A real correlation function is a bit more complicated as you have to allow for the signal level to be changed - if I am looking for a signal of N samples in a received data stream of M samples, I have to do M*N multiply and add operations to get my correlation. Now, for a radar signal I might be sampling at over a billion samples a second, and looking for a chirp of a 100 ns would give me over 100 billion MAC operations a second. There are ways to do that with conventional DSPs, but they are a galloping BITCH to do (you basically make a cluster of DSPs, and each DSP takes a part of the signal. Synchronising that is a bitch.)

This device would work by having the shape of the outbound pulse represented in the structure of the device itself, and the MACs are done by taking the incoming data stream and projecting it on the structure - thus you do all your processing in parallel, and at wire speed. You get a pulse out when the incoming signal matched the signal you ar looking for.

ps Dupe.

Re:Picture

[rgoer]

Ancient Chinese Proverb: "Yesterday's +5, Informative is today's -1, Redundant."

Re:OFN

[1000StonedMonkeys]

Now I'm not a subscriber, so I don't know if this functionality already exists, but it seems like it would be handy if when subscribers saw articles early they could mark them as duplicates for the editors to check.

What changed?!

[Daath]

/.'er: Whoa. Deja vu.
Trinity: What did you just say?
/.'er: Nothing. Just had a little deja vu.
Trinity: What happened? What did you see?
/.'er: A post on slashdot about a CPU. Then another just like it.
Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same post?
/.'er: It might have been. I'm not sure. What is it?
Trinity: A deja vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.
/.: Figures. Perl sucks.

Re:OFN

[jerde]

The other possibility might be for /. editors to... well, actually READ slashdot.

Nah.

- Peter

Processing at the speed of light

[eples]

enabling it to compute at the speed of light, the company said.

Ummmm, don't electrons travel that fast anyway?

Can't you UN-POST something?

[simetra]

Really, how hard can that be. Or do you get paid per post?