The goal of this course is to show the student a basic optical CPU to show it to work and to describe in detail the workings including a scalable and possibly reusable micro-programmable optical control unit.
The optical control unit uses a basic setup which is a mapping ROM attached to a presettable binary counter attached to a control ROM of which the outputs are programmed and map to various circuits for clocking or for setting a multiplexer or de-multiplexer etc. The component count including optical waveguides and pivot points is around 1000 components.
This course was a journey for me into optical circuit design with my own self designed Digital Photonic simulation software. I am sharing my first journey with the software which is a basic 4 bit optical CPU. The hobby software took about 6 long years to design and this circuit was used to test the software. I hope the course satisfies you curiosities of digital Photonics.
You should note that with this simulator I use proof of concept algorithms where a high intensity maps to a logic 1 and a low intensity maps to a logic 0. Thus at a high level the hardware algorithm can be shown to work. This is similar to Digital Electronics but in the optical domain.
Who this course is for:
Anyone interested in optical/photonic digital CPU design
Course content
1 section • 11 lectures • 46m total length
