%0 Journal Article
%T Optical Computing: A 60-Year Adventure
%A Pierre Ambs
%J Advances in Optical Technologies
%D 2010
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2010/372652
%X Optical computing is a very interesting 60-year old field of research. This paper gives a brief historical review of the life of optical computing from the early days until today. Optical computing generated a lot of enthusiasm in the sixties with major breakthroughs opening a large number of perspectives. The period between 1980 and 2000 could be called the golden age with numerous new technologies and innovating optical processors designed and constructed for real applications. Today the field of optical computing is not ready to die, it has evolved and its results benefit to new research topics such as nanooptics, biophotonics, or communication systems. 1. Introduction The knowledge of some history of sciences is useful for understanding the evolution of a research domain, its successes and failures. Optical computing is an interesting candidate for a historical review. This research field is also named optical information processing, and now the terms of information optics or information photonics are frequently used, reflecting the evolution of the domain. Optical computing is approximately 60 years old and it is a well-defined domain with its own specialized conferences, sections in the scientific journals and its own research programs and funding. It was also very active worldwide and therefore it is impossible in the frame of a paper to describe all the research results. Numerous books were written on the subject, for example, the following books describe the state of the art of optical computing at the time of their publication in 1972 [1], in 1981-82 [2, 3], in 1989 [4], and in 1998-99 [5, 6]. Since optical computing is such a well defined field over such a long period of time, it is interesting to study its evolution and this study can be helpful to understand why some research domains were very successful during only a limited period of time while other have generated numerous applications that are still in use. From the beginning there was a lot of questioning about the potential of optics for computing whereas there was no doubt about the potential and the future of electronics. Caulfield wrote in 1998 an interesting and enlightening paper on the perspectives in optical computing [7] where he discusses this competition between optics and electronics and shows that there were three phases, first ˇ°ignorance and underestimationˇ± of electronics then ˇ°awakening and fear inferiorityˇ± and now ˇ°realistic acceptance that optical computing and electronics are eternal partnersˇ±. The purpose of this paper is to show a short history of optical
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aot/2010/372652/