Approaches to optical microprogramming

Approaches to the optical implementation of the stored-program concept are presented. The focus is on microprogramming, which is commonly used to organize data flow at the lowest hardware level. It is shown that the traditional implementation used in electronic computers maps easily into optics in many ways. A distributed addressing approach provides a simple solution, while a centralized addressing approach becomes more space-efficient as the number of instructions increases. A main contribution is the use of holographic storage for the control instructions. It is shown that full utilization of this storage technique can be achieved within a suggested interconnection structure.<>