ABSTRACT
The basic operation of a digital computer is performing arithmetic and logic unit processing. The aim of this entry is to show that these basic operations can also be performed by optics. There are two main tasks in an arithmetic and logic unit: arithmetic and logic operations. The arithmetic tasks include addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, while the logic tasks are the 16 Boolean functions. Electronic digital computation is plagued by the bottleneck of sequential processing. However, an optical processor is naturally a parallel operation. The reaffirmation of the parallelism of optics and the development of picosecond and femtosecond optical switches have thrust optics into the nontraditional digital computing area.
