Memories Are Made Of This

• Donald M. Chiarulli, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Steven P. Levitan, associate professor in the School of Engineering Department of Electrical Engineering, have been awarded a grant from the U.S. Air Force to integrate an optical memory into a desk top personal computer system.
• Chiarulli and Levitan are developing optoelectronic cache, a device to replace the primary memory of a personal computer by connecting the computer to an optically active polymer cube that stores two-dimensional pages.
• Such a system has three critical advantages.
• Speed reading a plane of light, a two-dimensional memory, as opposed to reading bits serially, allows for a much faster system.
• Capacity total amount of memory available would increase to gigabytes, billions of bytes of memory. Efficiency rather than being a separate process, the interface is "transparent," readily available to the user of the system without any additional operating steps.
• The application for this system, as Chiarulli and Levitan explained, is any operation that needs fast access to a huge database on a personal computer, such as a map database for air navigation or a medical database for emergency treatment.
• The team expects to have a prototype by the end of 1997.