Optical interconnections advantages

Optical connectors ate used to terminate and interconnect fiber optic cables (see Fiber OPTICS). Transmission of information by light through optical fibers made of glass or plastic is less expensive in many cases than transmission of electric signals through wire. An advantage of fiber optic technology is that it is... 

The two components (SASLM 1 and SASLM 2) can now be combined with CGHs to route (fan-out) the light through the optical neural network, as in Fig. 64. SASLM 1 is used as the neurons and SASLM 2 makes up the synaptic weights. The system is almost entirely optical and the advantages are inherent compared to electronic neural nets, as the interconnections are total and performed in free space. The problem is that for n SASLM 1 neurons, SASLM 2 weighting smart pixels are required, which limits the processing power of the neural net due to VLSI constraints [75]. 

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