Political and military imperatives will continue to push the technology for faster processors, smarter information systems, larger memories, and greater communications capacity to ensure the reliable and secure control of our military forces. The advent of satellite surveillance and reconnaissance and the continual development of more sophisticated radar systems has opened the way to providing military commanders the capability of real-time monitoring of military conflicts. Today's research must push an emerging technology capable of transmitting and processing vast quantities of information and displaying the most pertinent command information at a centralized command center. One such technology is optical processing, or better yet, hybrid optical-analog/electronic-digital processing. Optical systems offer parallel computations with speeds unattainable with present digital computer technology, and the hybrid systems combine this speed and data handling capability with the computational flexibility and accuracy of digital processing. The Air Force sponsored research program is aimed toward increasing the flexibility of optical processing through the support of scientific endeavors in such areas as non-linear optics, optical feedback, space variant processing, and optical computations. The research spans a broad realm of efforts from feasibility studies all the way to the fabrication of novel devices. This paper will describe the currently active efforts in this program.

Date Published: 29 February 1980
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 0209, Optical Signal Processing for C3I, (29 February 1980);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0209:
Optical Signal Processing for C3I
William J. Miceli, Editor(s)