Now for Something Completely Different

Submitted by BDTI on Thu, 11/15/2001 - 21:00

At the Communication Design Conference in October Lenslet unveiled its novel optical digital signal processing engine (ODSPE), which, it hopes, will boost DSP performance to the level of tera operations per second—far above the current level of giga operations per second found in today's electron-based processors. This technology targets a wide range of applications that include both wireless and wireline communication systems.

The heart of digital signal processing is the manipulation of digital signals, often by means of transforms like the FFT. The foundation of Lenslet's approach is based on the fact that light undergoes similar transformations when it passes through optical elements. Imagine light moving towards an optical element as input data and the same light, having passed through the optical element, as output data. With suitably adjustable optical elements, this system could implement any kind of digital transform.

The major advantage of this approach is the speed with which transforms can be performed. While transforms implemented with conventional electronic circuits require multiple manipulations of a data series, optically based digital signal processing can perform a transform with but one pass of light through a lens. And the optical elements required for this—vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, compound lenses, spatial light modulators—are inexpensive. However, ODSPEs only address transforms, and thus traditional DSPs or other solutions will still be required for other processing functions, e.g., encoding and decoding algorithms.

Lenslet plans to release two product implementations of this technology—the EnLight256 and the Customized-EnLight. The EnLight256 will be a general-purpose reconfigurable electro-optical transform engine that functions as a coprocessor connected to a master processor. The EnLight256's reconfigurability is twofold: it can adjust its optical elements to the predetermined specifications of any transform in its transform library, and new transforms can also be added to this transform library. The Customized-EnLight can be custom tailored to meet the specific needs of an application. Prototypes of Lenslet products are expected next year, with production not anticipated until 2004. The company has already demonstrated an 8 TOPS, 20 Watt device.

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