Access Type

Open Access Dissertation

Date of Award

January 2022

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Pharm.D./Ph.D.

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Dimitrios Sounas

Abstract

As digital circuits are approaching the limits of Moore’s law, a great deal of efforthas been directed to alternative computing approaches. Among them, the old concept of optical signal processing (OSP) has attracted attention, revisited in the light of metamaterials and nano-photonics. This approach has been successful in realizing basic mathematical operations, such as derivatives and integrals, but it is difficult to be applied to more complex ones. Inspired by digital filters, we propose a radically new OSP approach, able to realize arbitrary mathematical operations over a nano-photonic platform. We demonstrate this concept for the case of spatial differentiation, image compression and color encoding through a heuristic design based on a waveguide with periodic arrays of input/output channels at its opposite walls.

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