<title>A Digital Optical Processing System</title>

Abstract

Digital optical processing (DOP) was conceived to encompass the advantages of both electronic and optical processors, which are parallelism, flexibility, and high accuracy. In this paper we discuss the concept of parallelism, how it applies to DOP differently than to Electronic Parallel Processing, and other potential advantages in using DOP. A PLZT device will also be described which can perform a series of logic or memory operations. From several of these PLZT devices a DOP is constructed to illus-trate some of its programmability features.