Pipelined optoelectronic free-space permutation network

A three-dimensional optoelectronic multistage permutation network is proposed. Shuffle-exchange stages are implemented by using a folded free-space optical system to connect a two-dimensional array of processing elements to itself. The proposed processing elements contain optoelectronic input and output devices coupled to electronic switches. The analysis shows that pipelined operation for large processing element arrays (>1024) can be achieved with a single optical system by interleaving the source-detector pairs of different stages to exploit the large optical space-bandwidth product.