System Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of the Optical Broadband Correlator

Abstract : This report describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of an acousto-optical wide band correlator that is integrated into a digital signal processing system testbed. The report compares the correlator's measured performance with various theoretical performance measures, one of which compares the optical system with an equivalent efficient digital correlator. This measured performance of the optical system was 20 to 70 times that of a VAX 6410 using an FFT correlation algorithm and a vector processor, even though the electronic interface system limited the performance of the optical system to less than one-half percent of its potential.