Large-scale optical programmable logic array for two-dimensional cellular automaton

Despite more than 40 years of development, it remains difficult for optical logic computing to support more than four operands because the high parallelism of light has not been fully exploited in current methods that are restrained by inefficient optical nonlinearity and redundant input modulation. In this paper, we propose a large-scale optical programmable logic array (PLA) based on parallel spectrum modulation. By fully exploiting the wavelength resource, an eight-input PLA is experimentally demonstrated with 256 wavelength channels. And it is extended to nine-input PLA through the combination of wavelength’s and spatial dimensions. Based on PLA, many advanced logic functions like 8-256 decoder, 4-bit comparator, adder and multiplier, and state machines are first realized in optics. We implement the two-dimensional optical cellular automaton (CA) for what we believe is the first time and run Conway’s Game of Life to simulate the complex evolutionary processes (pulsar explosion, glider gun, and breeder). Other CA models, such as the replicator-like evolution and the nonisotropic evolution to generate the Sierpinski triangle are also demonstrated. Our work significantly alleviates the challenge of scalability in optical logic devices and provides a universal optical computing platform for two-dimensional CA.