Nonlinear Thresholding Characteristics for Optical Computing of Optically Addressable GaAs/FLC-SLM,

Abstract : In a wide variety of optical parallel processings, spatial light modulators (SLMs), especially optically addressable SLMs (OASLMs), are versatile devices. SLMs have been used as an optical encoder and latch memory for optical computing and synaptic weighting mask for optical neural network. In this paper, accumulative thresholding (AT) characteristic, originated from the nonlinear transfer function, of newly developed GaAs/FLC-SLM that is a special class of OASLM structured with GaAs p-i-n diode and ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC) is investigated. A monotonous sigmoid-like thresholding against optical energy of input pulses sequence is experimentally obtained. Furthermore, the application of the nonlinear characteristic of the SLM to both OR logic gate and latch memory is proposed.