如果不是他现在刚刚四十岁出头,我真愿把Alan Huang称为数字光学的伟大老人。作为美国电报电话公司光学处理器的发明人,他是贝尔实验室数字光学研究负责人和光子技术的开路先锋。黄说,光学处理器在一年半以前问世。制造这类处理器的一个原因是,要打破一些令人害怕的神话。这个神话就是,“天呀!用透镜代替导线进行所有的连接实在太难了。”另一个原因是想从理论上证明,可以做成千万个连接,它们将来会有用处。光学处理器的大部分工程与贝尔实验室已研制出的光子开关构造有关。黄把它们称作 If he was not in his early forties, I would really like to call Alan Huang the great old man of digital optics. As the inventor of the American Telegraph and Telephone Company’s optical processor, he was the pioneer of digital optics research and photonics at Bell Labs. Huang said that the optical processor came out a year and a half ago. One reason for making such processors is to break some scary myths. The myth is, “God! It’s really hard to use lenses instead of wires to make all the connections.” Another reason is to prove theoretically that you can make millions of connections and they will be useful in the future. Most of the optical processor engineering concerns the photonic switch architecture that Bell Labs has developed. Huang called them