Interaction of guided optical waves with microwave magnetostatic waves in yittrium iron garnet thin films has been demonstrated. TM↔TE mode conversion induced by codirectional (and contradirectional) magnetostatic waves was experimentally observed with conversion efficiencies of up to 4%. Theoretical expressions for this interaction are given and compared with observations. The thin-film geometry demonstrated could make a practical number of optical signal processing devices in the 1–20-GHz range.

An acoustooptic technique was used to design and construct a prototype of a processor capable of multiplying a 128 x 128 complex-element matrix by a 128 complex-element vector. The device was specified to execute 10(5) matrix-vector products per second with 8-bit resolution. The performance of each component of the prototype was evaluated, as was the impact of component performance on system performance.

Optical associative, parallel-processing architectures are being developed using a multimodule approach, where a number of smaller, adaptive, associative modules are nonlinearly interconnected and cascaded under the guidance of a variety of organizational principles to structure larger architectures for solving specific problems. A number of novel optical implementations with versatile adaptive learning capabilities are presented for the individual associative modules, including holographic configurations and five specific electrooptic configurations. The practical issues involved in real optical architectures are analyzed, and actual laboratory optical implementations of associative modules based on Hebbian and Widrow-Hoff learning rules are discussed, including successful experimental demonstrations of their operation.

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