Research of Tri-State Optical Signal Detectors for Ternary Optical Computers

A tri-state optical signal detector (TOD) is designed in this article to improve the accuracy and stability of decoding results of the ternary optical computer (TOC). The TOD consists of three modules: a light-sensing module, a voltage divider module, and a data latching and conversion module. First, a voltage divider circuit with adjustable resistors is used to achieve parallel optical-electrical signal conversion for each LCD pixel on a photosensitive sensor plus a latch structure. Second, the problem of the parallel storage of data after photoelectric conversion is solved. Third, a transcoding circuit from the output signal of the TOD to the input signal of the tri-state optical encoder (TOE) is given. The experimental results show that the tri-state optical signal detector designed in this paper is effective and feasible.