Despite more than 40 years of development, it remains difficult for optical logic computing to support more than four operands because the high parallelism of light has not been fully exploited in current methods that are restrained by inefficient optical nonlinearity and redundant input modulation. In this paper, we propose a large-scale optical programmable logic array (PLA) based on parallel spectrum modulation. By fully exploiting the wavelength resource, an eight-input PLA is experimentally demonstrated with 256 wavelength channels. And it is extended to nine-input PLA through the combination of wavelength’s and spatial dimensions. Based on PLA, many advanced logic functions like 8-256 decoder, 4-bit comparator, adder and multiplier, and state machines are first realized in optics. We implement the two-dimensional optical cellular automaton (CA) for what we believe is the first time and run Conway’s Game of Life to simulate the complex evolutionary processes (pulsar explosion, glider gun, and breeder). Other CA models, such as the replicator-like evolution and the nonisotropic evolution to generate the Sierpinski triangle are also demonstrated. Our work significantly alleviates the challenge of scalability in optical logic devices and provides a universal optical computing platform for two-dimensional CA.
Canonical logic units-based programmable logic array (CLUs-PLA) is an important combinational logic device for its flexibility and user-defined feature. All-optical high-speed CLUs-PLA will lay the foundation for future high-speed optical computing and optical logic processing chip. For standard three-input all-optical CLUs-PLA, one nonlinear device can produce only one type of three-input CLU. In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a scheme that one nonlinear device can produce eight different types of three-input CLUs simultaneously, owing to introducing bidirectional four-wave mixing and wavelength spacing optimization. We obtain error-free performance for all three-input CLUs operations at 40 Gb/s. Comparing to standard three-input all-optical CLUs-PLA, parallel all-optical CLUs-PLA based on our proposed scheme can greatly reduce the number of nonlinear devices and simplify the computing system.
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