An Optical Processor for Matrix-by-Vector Multiplication: an Application to the Distance Geometry Problem in 1D

International audienceWe present the architecture of a new optical processor specialized in matrix-by-vector multiplication via the manipulation of the light wavefront. This processor can reach up to 1.2 Giga MAC (multiply-accumulate) operations per second using commercially available devices. Moreover, this architecture is compatible with a hardware upgrade with the potential to achieve a processing speed of above Tera MAC per second. We initially present the optical processor and then discuss the use of such a processor for tackling a special class of the one-dimensional Distance Geometry Problem (DGP), which is a well-known NP-hard problem