A plurality of optical crossbar switches and exchange switches for parallel ...

[54] A PLURALITY OF OPTICAL CROSSBAR SWITCHES AND EXCHANGE SWITCHES FOR PARALLEL PROCESSOR COMPUTER

[75] Inventor: Alastair D. McAulay, Dallas, Tex.

[73] Assignee: Texas Instruments Incorporated, Dallas, Tex.

[21] Appl. No.: 901,868

[22] Filed: Aug. 29,1986

Related U.S. Application Data

[63] Continuation-in-part of Ser. No. 802,652, Nov. 27, 1985.

[51] Int. Cl.« G06F 7/56

[52] U.S. CI 364/200; 364/822;

370/1; 350/96.13; 350/96.15 [58] Field of Search ... 364/200 MS File, 900 MS File, 364/822; 370/1; 350/96.2, 96.13, 96.15

[56] References Cited

U.S. PATENT DOCUMENTS

4,358,858 11/1982 Tamura et al 455/607

4,543,662 9/1985 Huignard et al 455/600

FOREIGN PATENT DOCUMENTS

55-135801 10/1980 Japan .

55-50224 11/1980 Japan .

59-122142 7/1984 Japan .

60-51342 3/1985 Japan .

2164516 3/1986 United Kingdom .

Primary Examiner—David Y. Eng

Assistant Examiner—Emily Y. Chan

Attorney, Agent, or Firm—Melvin Sharp; James T.

Comfort; Thomas G. Devine

[57] ABSTRACT

A computer (30) has parallel elementary processors (PI, ..., PK) interconnected by an optical crossbar switch (32). Multiple groups of processors, each having a separate crossbar switch, are connected by exchange switches. Optical fibers (34) are used to provide high speed communication between the processors and the switch (32). The optical crossbar switch (32) is reconfigurable dynamically. The computer is reconfigurable to provide efficient implementations of signal processing and logical inference computations, including a systolic filter, a fast Fourier transform, a correlator and a matrix-vector multiplier, forward and backward chaining inference machine, and speech recognizer.

2 Claims, 29 Drawing Sheets