Optical thyristor based subsystems for digital parallel processing: demonstrators and future perspectives

In this paper we study the practical implementation of arrays of differential pairs of optical thyristors in systems and demonstrate some basic functionalities as a first step towards the construction of a primitive digital parallel optical processor. We demonstrate element to element digital optical data transcription between single elements at 0.5 MHz. This is a lower data rate than the 50 MHz demonstrated for transcription between neighbouring elements on a single wafer but is due to the fact that we employ an optical system which allows plane to plane imaging with a wider field of view but lower efficiency. This allows us to demonstrate transcription between 8x8 arrays of elements with a channel data rate of 50 kHz. By using a compact optical system which combines large diameter GRIN lenses with Fourier plane diffractive optics we are able to implement a system with three cascaded thyristor stages with an element to array fan-out of 3. Moreover we demonstrate digital optical logic NAND, NOR, AND and OR operations at a speed of 160 kHz. Finally we investigate system scalability.