An Optical Tri-valued Computing System

A new optical computing experimental system is presented. Designed based on tri-valued logic, the system is built as a photoelectric hybrid computer system which is much advantageous over its electronic counterparts. Say, the tri-valued logic of the system guarantees that it is more powerful in information processing than that of systems with binary logic. And the optical characteristic of the system makes it be much capable in huge data processing than that of the electronic computers. The optical computing system includes two parts, electronic part and optical part. The electronic part consists of a PC and two embedded systems which are used for data input/output, monitor, synchronous control, user data combination and separation and so on. The optical part includes three components. They are optical encoder, logic calculator and decoder. It mainly answers for encoding the users' requests into tri-valued optical information, computing and processing the requests, decoding the tri-valued optical information to binary electronic information and so forth. Experiment results show that the system is quite right in optical information processing which demonstrates the feasibility and correctness of the optical computing system.