Optical computing

1. INTRODUCTION

With the growth of computing technology the need of high performance

computers (HPC) has significantly increased. Optics has been used in computing for a
number of years but the main emphasis has been and continues to be to link portions
of computers, for communications, or more intrinsically in devices that have some
optical application or component (optical pattern recognition etc.)

Optical computing was a hot research area in 1980’s.But the work tapered off
due to materials limitations that prevented opto-chips from getting small enough and
cheap enough beyond laboratory curiosities. Now, optical computers are back with
advances in self-assembled conducting organic polymers that promise super-tiny of all
optical chips.

Optical computing technology is, in general, developing in two directions. One

approach is to build computers that have the same architecture as present day
computers but using optics that is Electro optical hybrids. Another approach is to
generate a completely new kind of computer, which can perform all functional
operations in optical mode. In recent years, a number of devices that can ultimately
lead us to real optical computers have already been manufactured. These include
optical logic gates, optical switches, optical interconnections and optical memory.

Current trends in optical computing emphasize communications, for example

the use of free space optical interconnects as a potential solution to remove
‘Bottlenecks’ experienced in electronic architectures. Optical technology is one of the
most promising, and may eventually lead to new computing applications as a
consequence of faster processing speed, as well as better connectivity and higher
bandwidth.
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2. NEED FOR OPTICAL COMPUTING

The pressing need for optical technology stems from the fact that today’s
computers are limited by the time response of electronic circuits. A solid transmission
medium limits both the speed and volume of signals, as well as building up heat that
damages components.

One of the theoretical limits on how fast a computer can function is given by
Einstein’s principle that signal cannot propagate faster than speed of light. So to make
computers faster, their components must be smaller and there by decrease the distance
between them. This has resulted in the development of very large scale integration
(VLSI) technology, with smaller device dimensions and greater complexity. The
smallest dimensions of VLSI nowadays are about 0.08mm. Despite the incredible
progress in the development and refinement of the basic technologies over the past
decade, there is growing concern that these technologies may not be capable of
solving the computing problems of even the current millennium. The speed of
computers was achieved by miniaturizing electronic components to a very small
micron-size scale, but they are limited not only by the speed of electrons in matter but
also by the increasing density of interconnections necessary to link the electronic gates
on microchips.

The optical computer comes as a solution of miniaturization problem.Optical

data processing can perform several operations in parallel much faster and easier than
electrons. This parallelism helps in staggering computational power. For example a
calculation that takes a conventional electronic computer more than 11 years to
complete could be performed by an optical computer in a single hour. Any way we
can realize that in an optical computer, electrons are replaced by photons, the
subatomic bits of electromagnetic radiation that make up light.
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3. SOME KEY OPTICAL COMPONENTS FOR COMPUTING

The major breakthroughs on optical computing have been centered on the

development of micro-optic devices for data input.

1. VCSEL (VERTICAL CAVITY SURFACE EMITTING LASER)

VCSEL (pronounced ‘vixel’) is a semiconductor vertical cavity surface

emitting laser diode that emits light in a cylindrical beam vertically from the surface
of a fabricated wafer, and offers significant advantages when compared to the edge-
emitting lasers currently used in the majority of fiber optic communications devices.
The principle involved in the operation of a VCSEL is very similar to those of regular
lasers.
There are two special semiconductor materials sandwiching an
active layer where all the action takes place. But rather than reflective ends, in a
VCSEL there are several layers of partially reflective mirrors above and below the
active layer. Layers of semiconductors with differing compositions create these
mirrors, and each mirror reflects a narrow range of wavelengths back in to the cavity
in order to cause light emission at just one wavelength.

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OPTICAL INTERCONNECTION OF CIRCUIT BOARDS USING

VCSEL AND PHOTODIODE

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VCSEL convert the electrical signal to optical signal when the light beams are
passed through a pair of lenses and micromirrors. Micromirrors are used to direct the
light beams and this light rays is passed through a polymer waveguide which serves as
the path for transmitting data instead of copper wires in electronic computers. Then
these optical beams are again passed through a pair of lenses and sent to a photodiode.
This photodiode convert the optical signal back to the electrical signal.

2. SLM (SPATIAL LIGHT MODULATORS)

SLM play an important role in several technical areas where the control of light
on a pixel-by-pixel basis is a key element, such as optical processing and displays.

SLM FOR DISPLAY PURPOSES

For display purposes the desire is to have as many pixels as

possible in as small and cheap a device as possible. For such purposes designing
silicon chips for use as spatial light modulators has been effective. The basic idea is to
have a set of memory cells laid out on a regular grid. These cells are electrically
connected to metal mirrors, such that the voltage on the mirror depends on the value
stored in the memory cell. A layer of optically active liquid crystal is sandwiched
between this array of mirrors and a piece of glass with a conductive coating. The
voltage between individual mirrors and the front electrode affects the optical activity
of liquid crystal in that neighborhood. Hence by being able to individually program
the memory locations one can set up a pattern of optical activity in the liquid crystal
layer.

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3. SMART PIXEL TECHNOLOGY

Smart pixel technology is a relatively new approach to integrating electronic

circuitry and optoelectronic devices in a common framework. The purpose is to
leverage the advantages of each individual technology and provide improved
performance for specific applications. Here, the electronic circuitry provides complex
functionality and programmability while the optoelectronic devices provide high-
speed switching and compatibility with existing optical media. Arrays of these smart
pixels leverage the parallelism of optics for interconnections as well as computation.
A smart pixel device, a light emitting diode under the control of a field effect
transistor can now be made entirely out of organic materials on the same substrate for
the first time. In general, the benefit of organic over conventional semiconductor
electronics is that they should lead to cheaper, lighter, circuitry that can be printed
rather than etched.

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4. WDM (WAVELENGTH DIVISION MULTIPLEXING)

Wavelength division multiplexing is a method of sending many different wavelengths

down the same optical fiber. Using this technology, modern networks in which
individual lasers can transmit at 10 gigabits per second through the same fiber at the
same time.

WDM can transmit up to 32 wavelengths through a single fiber, but cannot

meet the bandwidth requirements of the present day communication systems. So
nowadays DWDM (Dense wavelength division multiplexing) is used. This can
transmit up to 1000 wavelengths through a single fiber. That is by using this we can
improve the bandwidth efficiency.

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4. ROLE OF NLO IN OPTICAL COMPUTING

The role of nonlinear materials in optical computing has become extremely

significant. Non-linear materials are those, which interact with light
and modulate its properties. Several of the optical components require efficient-
nonlinear materials for their operations. What in fact restrains the widespread use of
all optical devices is the in efficiency of currently available nonlinear materials, which
require large amount of energy for responding or switching.

Organic materials have many features that make them desirable for use in
optical devices such as

1. High nonlinearities
2. Flexibility of molecular design
3. Damage resistance to optical radiations

Some organic materials belonging to the classes of phthalocyanines and

polydiacetylenes are promising for optical thin films and wave guides. These
compounds exhibit strong electronic transitions in the visible region and have high
chemical and thermal stability up to 400 degree Celsius. Polydiacetylenes are among
the most widely investigated class of polymers for nonlinear optical applications.
Their subpicosecond time response to laser signals makes them candidates for high-
speed optoelectronics and information processing.

To make thin polymer film for electro-optic applications, NASA scientists

dissolve a monomer (the building block of a polymer) in an organic solvent. This
solution is then put into a growth cell with a quartz window, shining a laser through
the quartz can cause the polymer to deposit in specific pattern.
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5. ADVANCES IN PHOTONIC SWITCHES

Logic gates are the building blocks of any digital system. An optical logic gate
is a switch that controls one light beam by another; it is ON when the device transmits
light and it is OFF when it blocks the light.

To demonstrate the AND gate in the phthalocyanine film, two focused collinear
laser beams are wave guided through a thin film of phthalocyanine. Nanosecond green
pulsed Nd:YAG laser was used together with a red continuous wave (cw) He-Ne
beam. At the output a narrow band filter was set to block the green beam and allow
only the He-Ne beam. Then the transmitted beam was detected on an oscilloscope. It
was found that the transmitted He-Ne cw beam was pulsating with a nanosecond
duration and in synchronous with the input Nd:YAG nanosecond pulse. This
demonstrated the characteristic table of an AND logic gate.

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OPTICAL NAND GATE

In an optical NAND gate the phthalocyanine film is replaced by a hollow fiber

filled with polydiacetylene. Nd:YAG green picosecond laser pulse was sent
collinearly with red cw He-Ne laser onto one end of the fiber. At the other end of the
fiber a lens was focusing the output on to the narrow slit of a monochrometer with its
grating set for the red He-Ne laser. When both He-Ne laser and Nd:YAG laser are
present there will be no output at the oscilloscope. If either one or none of the laser
beams are present we get the output at the oscilloscope showing NAND function.

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6. OPTICAL MEMORY

In optical computing two types of memory are discussed. One consists of

arrays of one-bit-store elements and other is mass storage, which is implemented by
optical disks or by holographic storage systems. This type of memory promises very
high capacity and storage density. The primary benefits offered by holographic optical
data storage over current storage technologies include significantly higher storage
capacities and faster read-out rates. This research is expected to lead to compact, high
capacity, rapid-and random-access, and low power and low cost data storage devices
necessary for future intelligent spacecraft. The SLMs are used in optical data storage
applications. These devices are used to write data into the optical storage medium at
high speed.

More conventional approaches to holographic storage use ion doped lithium

niobate crystals to store pages of data.

For audio recordings ,a 150MBminidisk with a 2.5- in diameter has been

developed that uses special compression to shrink a standard CD’s640-MB storage
capacity onto the smaller polymer substrate. It is rewritable and uses magnetic field
modulation on optical material. The mini disc uses one of the two methods to write
information on to an optical disk. With the mini disk a magnetic field placed behind
the optical disk is modulated while the intensity of the writing laser is held constant.
By switching the polarity of the magnetic field while the laser creates a state of flux in
the optical material digital data can be recorded on a single layer. As with all optical
storage media a read laser retrieves the data.

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OPTICAL DISK

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WORKING

The 780nm light emitted from AlGaAs/GaAs laser diodes is collimated by a

lens and focused to a diameter of about 1micrometer on the disk. If there is no pit
where the light is incident, it is reflected at the Al mirror of the disk and returns to the
lens, the depth of the pit is set at a value such that the difference between the path of
the light reflected at a pit and the path of light reflected at a mirror is an integral
multiple of half-wavelength consequently, if there is a pit where light is incident, the
amount of reflected light decreases tremendously because the reflected lights are
almost cancelled by interference. The incident and reflected beams pass through the
quarter wave plate and all reflected light is introduced to the photodiode by the beam
splitter because of the polarization rotation due to the quarter wave plate. By the
photodiode the reflected light, which has a signal whether, a pit is on the disk or not is
changed into an electrical signal.

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7. APPLICATIONS

1. High speed communications :The rapid growth of internet, expanding at almost

15% per month, demands faster speeds and larger bandwidth than electronic
circuits can provide. Terabits speeds are needed to accommodate the growth rate
of internet since in optical computers data is transmitted at the speed of light which
is of the order of 3× 10*8 m/sec hence terabit speeds are attainable.
2. Optical crossbar interconnects are used in asynchronous transfer modes and
shared memory multiprocessor systems.
3. Process satellite data.

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8. MERITS

1. Optical computing is at least 1000 to 100000 times faster than today’s silicon
machines.
2. Optical storage will provide an extremely optimized way to store data, with
space requirements far lesser than today’s silicon chips.
3. Super fast searches through databases.
4. No short circuits, light beam can cross each other without interfering with each
other’s data.
5. Light beams can travel in parallel and no limit to number of packets that can
travel in the photonic circuits.
6. optical computer removes the bottleneck in the present day communication
system

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9. DRAWBACKS

1. Today’s materials require much high power to work in consumer products,

coming up with the right materials may take five years or more.
2. Optical computing using a coherent source is simple to compute and
understand, but it has many drawbacks like any imperfections or dust on the
optical components will create unwanted interference pattern due to scattering
effects. Incoherent processing on the other hand cannot store phase
information.

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10. SOME CURRENT RESEARCH

High performance computing has gained momentum in recent years , with

efforts to optimize all the resources of electronic computing and researcher brain
power in order to increase computing throughput. Optical computing is a topic of
current support in many places , with private companies as well as governments in
several countries encouraging such research work.

A group of researchers from the university of southern California , jointly with

a team from the university of California , los angles , have developed an organic
polymer with a switching frequency of 60 Ghz . this is three times faster than the
current industry standard , lithium niobate crystal baswed device. Another groupe at
brown university and the IBM , Almaden research center has used ultrafast laser
pulses to build ultra fast data storage devices . this groupe was able to achivie ultra
fast switching down to 100 picosecond .

In japan , NEC has developed a method for interconnecting circuit boards

optically using VCSEL arrays .Another researchers at NTT have designed an optical
backplane with free-space opical interconnects using tunable beam deflectors and
mirrors. Theproject achieved 1000 interconnections per printed circuit board;with a
throughput ranging from 1 to 10 Tb/s.

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11. FUTURE TRENDS

The Ministry of Information Technology has initiated a photonic

development program. Under this program some funded projects are continuing in
fiber optic high-speed network systems. Research is going on for developing new
laser diodes, photodetectors, and nonlinear material studies for faster switches.
Research efforts on nanoparticle thin film or layer studies for display devices are also
in progress. At the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai, efforts are in
progress to generate a white light source from a diode-case based fiber amplifier
system in order to provide WDM communication channels.

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12. CONCLUSION

Research in optical computing has opened up new possibilities in several

fields related to high performance computing, high-speed communications. To design
algorithms that execute applications faster ,the specific properties of optics must be
considered, such as their ability to exploit massive parallelism, and global
interconnections. As optoelectronic and smart pixel devices mature, software
development will have a major impact in the future and the ground rules for the
computing may have to be rewritten.

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13. REFERENCES

1. Debabrata Goswami , “ article on optical computing, optical components and

storage systems,” Resonance- Journal of science education pp:56-71 July
2003

2. Hossin Abdeldayem,Donald. O.Frazier, Mark.S.Paley and William.K, “Recent

advances in photonic devices for optical computing,” science.nasa.gov Nov
2001

3. Mc Aulay,Alastair.D , “Optical computer architectures and the application of

optical concepts to next generation computers”

4. John M Senior , “Optical fiber communications –principles and practice”

5. Mitsuo Fukuda “Optical semiconductor devices”

6. www.sciam.com

7. www.msfc.com

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CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION
2. NEED FOR OPTICAL COMPUTING
3. SOME KEY OPTICAL COMPONENTS FOR COMPUTING
4. ROLE OF NLO IN OPTICAL COMPUTING
5. ADVANCES IN PHOTONIC SWITCHES
6. OPTICAL MEMORY
7. APPLICATIONS
8. MERITS
9. DRAW BACKS
10. SOME CURRENT RESEARCH
11. FUTURE TRENDS
12. CONCLUSION
13. REFERENCES

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ABSTRACT

Optical computing means performing computations, operations, storage and

transmission of data using light. Instead of silicon chips optical computer uses organic
polymers like phthalocyanine and polydiacetylene.Optical technology promises
massive upgrades in the efficiency and speed of computers, as well as significant
shrinkage in their size and cost. An optical desktop computer is capable of processing
data up to 1,00,000 times faster than current models.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I extend my sincere gratitude towards Head of Department for giving us

his invaluable knowledge and wonderful technical guidance

I express my thanks to our group tutor and also to our staff advisor and for
their kind co-operation and guidance for preparing and presenting this seminar.

I also thank all the other faculty members of E&I department and my
friends for their help and support.

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