2020/09/25 by James Spall, Xianxin Guo, Thomas D. Barrett +1 · 1 voice
Physics and Astronomy · #physics.app-ph #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1364/ol.401675
published as Optics Letters Vol. 45, Issue 20, pp. 5752-5755 (2020) · 4 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2020/09/25 · arxiv published 2020/09/25 · arxiv updated 2020/11/23
Optics is a promising platform in which to help realise the next generation of fast, parallel and energy-efficient computation. We demonstrate a reconfigurable free-space optical multiplier that is capable of over 3000 computations in parallel, using spatial light modulators with a pixel resolution of only 340x340. This enables vector-matrix multiplication and parallel vector-vector multiplication with vector size of up to 56. Our design is the first to simultaneously support optical implementation of reconfigurable, large-size and real-valued linear algebraic operations. Such an optical multiplier can serve as a building block of special-purpose optical processors such as optical neural networks and optical Ising machines.