Free Space Digital Optics Research
Welcome to the Free Space Digital Optics web site. This site contains information about research performed within the Signal and Image Processing Institute at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. This research group is affliliated with the Integrated Media Systems Center.
We have documentation
on receivers designed for GMU's CO-OP program.
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Our research in the area of digtial optical interconnections within data processing and networking systems includes:
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Background
Our goal is to utilize the high data throughput potential of free space optical signal propagation in the design and implementation of novel high performance video and image processing systems, communication networks and page-oriented memory interfacing. The performance of chips and subsystems of current systems is limited by the relatively low data throughput of their internal chip-to-chip and board-to-board interconnections. These limitations will continue as the gap between on-chip and off-chip clock rates will grow much wider in the forseeable future as CMOS performance increases. We study free-space digital optics (FSDO) systems that use smart-pixel (SP) devices to provide high-density, high-information-capacity, parallel optical interconnections to electronic systems. Smart pixels are 'islands' of VLSI circuitry that integrate electronic processing and free-space optical I/O channels. Part of this research is the construction of working FSDO systems and the development of enabling system components such as diffractive optical elements (DOEs).
Shown here is an example of one of our smart pixel designs. This smart pixel is from our Smart Pixel ARray Cellular Logic (SPARCL) processing system. This smart pixel contains an optical detector and transmitter along with CMOS circuitry for processing. We have developed SPARCL chips that contain 2-D arrays of these smart pixels so that each chip can receive and/or transmit an entire image or data plane within a single clock cycle. In the SPARCL processor data flows through the system on an image-wide optical channel, producing very high data throughput. This smart pixel was fabricated at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies through the DARPA/GMU CO-OP program. This optoelectronic technology flip-chip bonds GaAs MQW diodes onto high-performance CMOS VLSI.
Please visit the link at the top of this page to learn about our research, group members, and other related links.
Contact Charles Kuznia about webpage, last updated April 27, 1998.
