Principle and implementation of thousands-trit ternary optical encoder

摘要

The encoder is an important component of the ternary optical computer which utilizes three steady states of light-horizontally polarized light, vertically polarized light (abbreviated V), and no-intensity state-to represent ternary information -1, 1, and 0 respectively. The encoder consists of light source, two electronically controlled liquid crystal units, and two vertical polarizers. The encoder can modulate corresponding three-state light signals according to the input binary electronic signals. This paper is about the thousand-trit (trit denotes one ternary data) ternary optical encoder which can parallelly modulate thousands three-state light signals. In order to realize the parallelism of the thousand-trit ternary optical encoder, a special kind of liquid crystal array whose pixels can be controlled synchronously was designed. By utilizing the parallel liquid crystal array, the thousands-trit ternary optical encoder was designed and implemented. Its principle, parallel liquid crystal array, and implementation were introduced in details.