| The application of optics to information processing has generated interest because of the promise of fundamentally high bandwidth and inherent parallelism. Taking advantage of these characteristic features of optics is highly dependent upon component technology. Remarkable advances have been made in technology over the past several years in the area of optoelectronics. These advances have resulted in high bandwidth light sources, optical modulators, and detectors, as well as low loss, nondispersive optical fiber. An opportunity has thus been created to develop new architectures for optical signal processing which can utilize the capabilities of the available technology. Fiber optic delay line signal processing is an area of research which has significant potential for utilizing these recently developed components. In addition to high bandwidth operation, fiber optic delay line signal processing offers the potential for achieving large time-bandwidth products. However, standard space-integrating architectures to fiber optic signal processing have certain inherent limitations which prohibit the features of modern optoelectronics to be fully appreciated.;In the following thesis, an alternative architecture for fiber optic delay line signal processing is presented based on the use of time-integrating techniques. It is shown that by implementing the time-integrating architecture, the limitations previously associated with fiber optic delay line signal processing can be significantly relaxed or eliminated altogether. Experimental results are presented demonstrating real-time autocorrelation using a time-integrating fiber optic delay line correlator.;The most fundamental limitations on the space-integrating fiber optic delay line correlator can be attributed to the use of optical fan-in in the basic architecture. This has implications that go well beyond fiber optic delay line signal processing because optical fan-in is a common element in many proposed parallel computing architectures. Evidence suggests that fundamental relationships exist between bandwidth, optical efficiency, and parallelism for optical fan-in, and hence, processing architectures using optical fan-in. A study of these relationships is included in the following thesis. Results are presented predicting a fundamental limit on bandwidth as a function of fan-in ratio. |
