ABSTRACT
Reaffirmation of optics parallelism and the development of picosecond and femtosecond optical switches have thrust optics into the nontraditional area of digital computing. The motivation primarily comes from the need for higher-performance general-purpose computers [1]. However, a computer with parallelism requires complicated interconnections, which is difficult to achieve by using wires or microcircuitries. Since both parallelism and interconnection are the inherent trait of optics, it is reasonable to look into the development of a general-purpose optical computer. We shall in this chapter restrict ourselves to a discussion of a few topics of computing with optics.
