Optically excited synapse for neural networks.

What can optics with its promise of parallelism do for neural networks which require matrix multipliers? An all optical approach requires optical logic devices which are still in their infancy. An alternative is to retain electronic logic while optically addressing the synapse matrix. This paper considers several versions of an optically addressed neural network compatible with VLSI that could be fabricated with the synapse connection unspecified. This optical matrix circuit is compared to an all electronic matrix multiplier.