A 4×4 Photorefractive Reconfigurable Interconnect Using Laser Diodes

Reconfigurable optical interconnection capable of partial or full broadcasting plays a key role in optical computing and optical neural network. The interconnection can be implemented using optical matrix-vector multiplication [1]. The reconfigurability is achieved by changing the interconnection matrix written on a spatial light modulator (SLM). For a one-to-one permutation link of an array of N sources to an array of N detectors, such an approach suffers a 1/N intrinsic fanout loss [1,2].