“Israeli technology Lenslet has begun shipping what it claims is the world’s first optical microprocessor. We should point out that we’re not talking a Pentium or G5 here. Instead, the EnLight 256 is a DSP chip designed to perform a series of simple operations rather than provide a basis for general purpose processing. However, its use of light rather than electronics enables it to perform up to eight trillion calculations per second - roughly a thousand times faster than semiconductor DSPs, the company claims. EnLight comprises an eight trillion ops per second vector-matrix engine, a 128 billion ops per second vector processing unit and a standard semiconductor DSP licensed from Texas Instruments for scalar processing and chip control.

It’s the vector-matrix maths unit - called the Ablaze core - that uses optical processing technology. The optical engine - or Spatial Light Modulator (SLM), as Lenset calls it - is… well… here’s how Lenset describes it: ‘A two dimensional 8-bit resolution, reflective mode intensity modulator.’ It operates using ‘advanced Multiple Quantum Well (MQW) [Gallium Arsenide] technology’.”

Source: The Register

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