Optical Computing: A 60-Year Adventure (2009)

This research field is also named optical information processing, and now the terms of information optics or information photonics are frequently used, reflecting the evolution of the domain. Since optical computing is such a well defined field over such a long period of time, it is interesting to study its evolution and this study can be helpful to understand why some research domains were very successful during only a limited period of time while other have generated numerous applications that are still in use. The architecture of a generic optical processor for information processing is given in Figure 1.

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