Outer product processor using polarization encoding

An architecture capable of performing the outer product operation followed by a weighting of the resultant elements is presented in this paper. By using a polarization encoding technique, the spatial capacity is increased by a factor of four over implementations using other techniques. The use of space-integrating photodiodes as detectors permits the evaluation of second-order polynomials. Spatial multiplexing allows the architecture greater versatility in performing a large number of operations in parallel. The primary application discussed here using this architecture is a quadratic neural network.