| Many disciplines, such as antenna beam-forming and adaptive optics, require the ability to perform high speed matrix operations, which often can be reduced to a series of matrix-vector products. Analog optical matrix-vector processors (OMVP's) take advantage of the high speed and parallelism of optics to rapidly compute matrix-vector products. However, OMVP's suffer from a low accuracy which currently hinders their widespread application. Over the past decade, various techniques have been introduced to achieve high accuracy computation with OMVP's. This dissertation studies the application of error-correcting codes (ECC's) and the union of ECC's with digital partitioning to achieve high accuracy computation. The ability of ECC's to improve the performance of OMVP's is studied through the use of computer simulations. The effect ECC's have on system throughput is also studied. Digital partitioning is a new technique for achieving high accuracy computations on analog OMVP's. One potential drawback of digital partitioning is its sensitivity to errors. Error-correcting codes can enhance the performance of the digital partitioning algorithm by reducing this sensitivity to errors. Computer simulation results are presented showing the benefits of using ECC's with digital partitioning. In addition, an analysis of the time requirements for encoding and decoding the ECC's and the effect on system throughput is presented. |
