Theory, Architecture, And Implementation Of Thousand-trit Ternary Optical Processor

Ternary optical computer (TOC) utilizes intensity and polarizations of light to present ternary information. For using many mature electrical equipments and optical elements, TOS has the characteristics of optical procession, transmission, electrical control, and opt-electrical hybrid memory. The core of TOC is the thousand-trit (trit means ternary number) ternary optical processor (TTOP) that consists of three main components----encoder, calculator, and decoder. The encoder modulates tri-valued optical signals according to applied electrical signals, and these tri-valued optical signals injected to the calculator. The calculator completes the operation through conversing states of tri-valued optical signals. These two components are made of polarizers and parallel controlled liquid crystal (LC) arrays. The decoder converts the result optical signals came from the calculator to corresponding electrical ones. The decoder is made of photoelectric sensors array and corresponding storage. The main works of this paper are researching of the theory of TTOP, designing feasible architecture, and implementing a TTOP system.The achievements that have been made in this paper can be summarized as follows:1) The first parallel controlled LC array that complies with the design requirements of TTOP is developed. The LC array is utilized to implement the optical components of TTOP. The control system of optical components is completed.2) The decoder of TTOP that referenced to the decoder of 360-trit experiment system is implemented.3) The optical components and decoder are integrated into a TTOP system. The test and self-checking system of TTOP are completed. 4) The first hardware reconfigurable calculator is designed.The author's work impoves the architecture of TTOP and simplifies the realization of optical calculator, and thus enriches the theory of TTOP. Using TTOP as platform, the other members of TOC research team complete TOC MSD adder, Matrix-Vector multiplyer, and Cellular Automata (CA) experiments that further prove the correctness and usability of TTOP. These experiments reveal TTOP's advantage of huge data parallel processing and its wide field of application with good prospects.