High-speed and low-power electro-optical DSP coprocessor

A fast, power-efficient electro-optical vector-by-matrix multiplier (VMM) architecture is presented. Careful design of an electrical unit supporting high-speed data transfer enables this architecture to overcome bottlenecks encountered by previous VMM architectures. Based on the proposed architecture, we present an electro-optical digital signal processing (DSP) coprocessor that can achieve a significant speedup of 2-3 orders of magnitude over existing DSP technologies and execute more than 16 teraflops. We show that it is feasible to implement the system using off-the-shelf components, analyze the performance of the architecture with respect to primitive DSP operations, and detail the use of the new architecture for several DSP applications. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America