General purpose computing using polarization-encoded optical shadow casting

A memory-efficient multioutput arithmetic logic unit has been designed using a polarization-encoded optical shadow casting scheme. The authors expand the scope of special-purpose optical digital computing to more general-purpose computing. Consequently, a novel design of an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) is proposed which is capable of performing both arithmetic and logical operations. A conventional ALU architecture is followed, where the output of the ALU are generated separately. Normally, all the outputs of an ALU are not required at the same time. Thus sequential output generation is not a bottleneck. The design algorithms for identifying the source patterns, input encoding, and output mask are presented.<>