Product category:
Microprocessors, Microcontrollers and DSPs
News Release from: Lenslet | Subject: ODSPE
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 03 May 2002
TeraOPS performance from optically based
DSP
Lenslet Labs has unveiled the architecture of the world's first commercial reconfigurable optically based digital signal processing engine (ODSPE).
Lenslet Labs has unveiled the architecture of the world's first commercial reconfigurable optically based digital signal processing engine (ODSPE) The ODSPE boosts the performance of digital signal processing, setting new performance levels of tera (one trillion, or 10 to the power of 12) operations per second, in a single component.
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 11 Oct 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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The core of the ODSPE is based on an optical architecture, which performs vector-matrix multiplication (VMM) in a single machine cycle.
The programmable optical core provides on-the-fly reconfigurability, meeting the market demand for functional flexibility.
The native VMM operation enables the implementation of digital signal processing algorithms simply and efficiently, at the highest level, using the natural representation of vectors and matrices.
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Component programming changes can be made at the application level or at the task level (within an application), or for values within a given task.
This flexibility allows the ODSPE to meet current and future computational requirements, reduces the component count for new solutions, and significantly cuts product life-cycle cost.
"Lenslet's ODSPE has turned the optical signal processing concept into a commercial reality", said Aviram Sariel, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lenslet Labs.
"Since the ODSPE technology announcement, last October, we have been inundated with calls from interested high-tech companies.
Today's architecture announcement is the second milestone on our product roadmap".
The first product based on Lenslet's ODSPE technology will be Enlight256.
It will be a general-purpose, off-the-shelf, reconfigurable, optical transform engine that uses VMM architecture.
vector-matrix multiplication (VMM) is the native operation of the ODSPE.
It is also a fundamental mathematical operator in Digital Signal Processing.
Since all linear mathematical transforms can be represented in VMM form, using VMM as the basic operator of the ODSPE eliminates the need to break algorithms into sequential multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations.
VMM streamlines the ODSPE's performance as well as code development in high-end multichannel DSP applications.
The optical core is composed of an input array of 256 vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSEL), a spatial light modulator (SLM) composed of 256 by 256 matrix elements, and a photodetector array (PDA) of 256 detectors.
As the light transmitted by a VCSEL passes through an SLM element, its intensity is attenuated by the transmissivity level of that SLM element, an effect equivalent to multiplication.
Each one of the VCSELs shines on one column in the SLM, and each one of the detectors collects the energy from one row in the SLM yielding a vector-matrix multiplication operation.
The 64K elements in the matrix are multiplied by the 256 elements in the input vector generating an output vector of 256 one-byte wide elements.
This is the key to the massive data parallelism of the ODSPE.
At the initial product's transform rate of 125MHz, the total performance is equivalent to 8 teraMAC operations per second.
The reconfigurability of the ODSPE is provided by changing the values stored in the SLM.
Changing applications or changing tasks within an application is equivalent to replacing the matrix in the SLM and thus providing a new transform.
The ease with which matrices can be changed, provides the on-the-fly reconfigurability needed for a commercially viable device.
Lenslet has developed a library of high-level functions already translated into the matrix format and a set of tools that will enable users to develop their own transform library.
The library and the tools are provided with the ODSPE to accelerate code development.
(This was Electronicstalk's Top Story on 2 May 2002).
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