Acousto-optic (AO) cells are widely used in real-time optical processing of RF signals because of their high computational throughput resulting from large modulation bandwidths and large parallel channel capacity. In this paper we discuss how an AO cell can be used to build a general purpose infinite impulse response (IIR) filter for processing sampled data or discrete time signals. The advantages of the system are high speed real time filtering of discrete time RF signals with sampling frequencies in the 10 MHz to a few GHz range. IIR filters are attractive because they can provide a good magnitude characteristics for a smaller number of taps than finite impulse response filters can. In our realization the filter coefficients are stored in spatial light modulators (SLMs) and thus can be changed in time to build adaptive IIR filters for various applications.

Date Published: 1 November 1991
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 1564, Optical Information Processing Systems and Architectures III, (1 November 1991); doi: 10.1117/12.49743

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1564:
Optical Information Processing Systems and Architectures III
Bahram Javidi, Editor(s)