This research is to develop a new class of spatial light modulators, which are comprised of ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC) modulators and silicon VLSI substrates to provide optoelectronic interconnects between processors and memory. By coating a silicon substrate with FLC material, those neural optoelectronic devices will have the advantages of both technologies: optics provides parallel inputs and outputs (avoiding the VLSI pin-out limitations); and, electronics provides the flexibility of the processing function. These devices are ideally suited for optoelectronic computing applications such as optical pattern recognition and correlation, analog memory for vector quantizers, optical neural networks and early sensory perception chips.
