Optical interconnects based on arrays of surfaceemitting lasers and lenslets.

A compact free-space optical system that uses arrays of surface-emitting lasers and lenslets for chip-to-chip and board-to-board optical communication is described. A seven-channel optical interconnect has been demonstrated at 300 Mbits/s per channel, and we describe how such a system can be expanded to several hundred channels while its compactness and alignability are retained.

Optical digital processor using arrays of symmetric self-electrooptic effect devices.

Four arrays of thirty-two GaAs symmetric self-electrooptic effect devices were optically interconnected to form a looped-pipeline optical digital processor. Several circuits were demonstrated, including two shift registers and a decoder circuit. Clock frequencies of up to 1 MHz were attained. Possible extensions to and limitations of this system are described.

Cascaded operation of arrays of symmetric self-electro-optic effect devices.

Two identical optical modules were used to demonstrate the cascaded operation of 32-element arrays of symmetric self-electro-optic effect devices. The devices had 5 microm x 10 microm optical windows spaced on a square grid with a 20-microm spacing. They were operated as optically interconnected inverters at 1.1 MHz. The optical power was provided by two current modulated laser diodes per array, each with a maximum output power of 9 mW. The operation of the devices as logic gates is optically implemented but not demonstrated.

Module for optical logic circuits using symmetric self-electrooptic effect devices.

An optical module designed to perform cascadable optical logic using arrays of symmetric self-electrooptic effect devices (S-SEEDs) is described. The operation of an array of 7 x 3 devices with optical windows spaced by 20 microm is demonstrated including both array preset and individual device switching. The issues leading to the design of this optical system are detailed. This work illustrates some of the issues which must be considered when designing systems using small reflecting electrooptic devices such as SEEDs and free-space optics in digital systems.

Highly cascadable optically bistable device for large fan-out optical computing uses.

Limited cascadability and fan-out are among the problems associated with the use of optically bistable Fabry-Perot -talons as optical logic elements. A novel etalon-based device is described which is shown to have a much increased cascadability, and therefore fan-out capability, over conventional optical logic elements.