Error-correction schemes for volume optical memories

An optically addressed Reed–Solomon parallel decoder has been designed and fabricated for onedimensional parallel access optical memories. The 315, 94 Reed–Solomon decoder operates on 60 parallel optical inputs and has been demonstrated at a data rate of 300 megabits/s. Compared with equivalent serial decoding solutions, this decoder is shown to be more area efficient and offers reduced latency. An extension to two-dimensional error correction using both the parallel and serial strategies is presented, and comparisons are made in terms of parallelism, page rate, and information rate for the two architectures. A hybrid optoelectronic decoding architecture that uses optical finite-field matrix–vector multipliers is given and is shown to offer error correction at large block sizes and aggregate data rates exceeding 10¹² bits/s.