Optical logic elements for high-throughput optical processors

An analysis is made of the current state and problems as well as prospects of the development of optical logic elements and threshold light amplifiers for high-throughput computing. An analysis is made of the specific case of a variant of an optical processor capable of 10¹³–10¹⁴ arithmetic operations per second under conditions of pipelined processing of two-dimensional arrays of multidigit binary operands. The basic requirements which must be satisfied by parameters and characteristics of optical logic elements in such a processor are identified.