ssh@hou2d.UUCP (S.HEGDE) (02/13/88)
Optical Digital Computers - Devices and Architecture
Dr. Alan Huang
AT&T Bell Laboratories
Date: Wednesday, February 17, 1988
Time: 7:30 pm
Place: Wilson Auditorium in Wilson Mansion
Monmouth College
West Long Branch, NJ
Extras: Coffee & tea will be served
Sponsor: IEEE NJ Coast Section Emerging Technologies and
Computer Chapter
Contacts: Abdul Hai (201) 615-5124
Shankar Hegde (201) 615-2822
A. Akinpelu (201) 949-0764
Abstract of the Talk:
Advances in computation are being limited by communication
considerations. The fastest transistors switch in 5
picoseconds whereas the fastest computer runs with a 5
nanosecond clock. This three orders of magnitude disparity
in speed can be traced to communication constraints such as
connectivity and bandwidth.
Optical digital computing is a natural extension of optical
interconnections. Optics now connect city to city, computer
to computer, computer to peripheral, and board to board.
Optics will eventually connect chip to chip and gate to
gate. At this point, the computer will be as much optical
as electronic.
One problem with this evolution is that it fails to take
advantage of the connectivity of optics. A lens can easily
convey a 100 by 100 array of spots. This can be considered
a 10,000 pin connector. Electronics can not support this
connectivity. As a result, the architectures used today can
not utilize this parallelism. This talk will discuss the
advances being made in exploiting this parallelism and also
outline the research efforts being made in developing
semiconductor based optical logic gates. These
semiconductor based optical logic gates should eventually be
comparable to the fastest transistors.
Optics has a greater connectivity and a higher bandwidth
than electronics. Optics should be able to interact the
signals with speeds and energies comparable to electronics.
Optics has the potential of communicating and interacting
signals with speeds far faster than electronics.
The Speaker:
Dr. Alan Huang received his B.S. and MSEE degrees from
Cornell University and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from
Stanford University in 1980.
Before Ph.D., he worked five summers as a programmer, one
year at the Yale Medical School as an EE/CS engineer, and
two years at Stanford Electronics Laboratory as a systems
programmer. After Ph.D., he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories.
Currently, he is head of the Optical Computing Research
Department in Computer Systems Research Laboratory.
Dr. Huang's research interests involve computer architecture
and optics. He has six patents granted and eighteen
pending.
Join us for this seminar on Optical Computers and learn
about the next generation of computer systems!!