Optical Computers

The conference "Nonlinear Optics and Optical Computing" was held May 11-19, 1988 in Erice, Sicily. This was the 13th conference organized by the International School of Quantum Electronics, under the auspices of the "Ettore Majorana" Center for Scientific Culture. This volume contains both the invited and contributed papers presented at the conference, providing tutorial background, the latest research results, and future directions for the devices, structures and architectures of optical computing. The invention of the transistor and the integrated circuit were followed by an explosion of application as ever faster and more complex microelectronics chips became available. The information revolution occa­ sioned by digital computers and optical communications is now reaching the limits of silicon semiconductor technology, but the demand for faster com­ putation is still accelerating. The fundamental limitations of information processing today derive from the performance and cost of three technical factors: speed, density, and software. Optical computation offers the potential for improvements in all three of these critical areas: Speed is provided by the transmission of impulses at optical veloc­ ities, without the delays caused by parasitic capacitance in the case of conventional electrical interconnects. Speed can also be achieved through the massive parallelism characteristic of many optical computing architec­ tures; Density can be provided in optical computers in two ways: by high spatial resolution, on the order of wavelengths of light, and by computa­ tion or interconnection in three dimensions.

Intended as an undergraduate/post graduate level textbook for courses on high speed optical networks as well as computer networks. Nine chapters cover basic principles of the technology and different devices for optical networks, as well as processing of integrated waveguide devices of optical networks using different technologies. It provides students, researchers and practicing engineers with an expert guide to the fundamental concepts, issues and state of the art developments in optical networks. Includes examples throughout all the chapters of the book to aid understanding of basic problems and solutions.

Quantum computers hold the promise of solving problems that would otherwise be intractable with conventional computers. Some prototypes of the simplest elements needed to build a quantum computer have already been implemented in the laboratory. The efforts now concentrate on combining these elements into scalable systems. In addition, alternative routes to creating large scale quantum computers are continuously being developed.
This volume gives a cross-section of recent achievements in both the theory and the practical realization of quantum computing devices. Samuel L. Braunstein (Reader, University of Wales, Bangor, and editor of the book "Quantum Computing - Where do we want to go tomorrow") and Hoi-Kwong Lo (Chief Scientist, MagiQ Technologies, Inc., NY) invited experts across many disciplines involved in the development of quantum computers to review their proposals in a manner accessible to the non-expert.

This book lies at the interface of machine learning – a subfield of computer science that develops algorithms for challenging tasks such as shape or image recognition, where traditional algorithms fail – and photonics – the physical science of light, which underlies many of the optical communications technologies used in our information society. It provides a thorough introduction to reservoir computing and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).