Optical content-addressable parallel processor: architecture, algorithms, and design concepts

Associative processing based on content-addressable memories has been argued to be the natural solution for non-numerical information processing applications. Unfortunately, the implementation requirements of these architectures u ing conventional electronic technology have been very cost prohibitive, and therefore associative processors have not been realized. Instead, software methods that emulate the behavior of associative processing have been promoted and mapped onto conven-tional ocation-addressable systems. This however, does not bring about he natural parallelism of associative processing, namely the ability to access many data words simultaneously. The inherently parallel nature and high speed of optics, combined with the recent echnologi-cal advancements in optical ogic, storage and interconnect devices axe raising hopes for practical realization of highly parallel optical computing systems. This paper presents the principles of de-signing an optical content-addressable parallel processor, called OCAPP, for the efficient support of high speed symbolic omputing. The architecture is designed to fully exploit he parallelism an high speed of optics. Several parallel algorithms are mapped onto 0CAPP in bit-paxallel as well as word-paxallel fashion, resulting in efficient symbolic algorithms with execution times dependent only on the precision of the operands and not on the problem size. This makes OCAPP very suitable fo