"Picture" logic and liquid crystals

An analysis is made of the feasibility of "picture" informs tion processing with the aid of the electro-optic effects in liquid crystals. The dynamic scattering and the twist effect, which are not greatly affected by external perturbations, can be used in building logic devices which can deal with 10 Boolean algebraic functions at processing rates up to 10⁶ bit/sec. Such devices require no more than 50 W for the optical input, processing, and output of information. The most promising applications of such devices are matrix transformations, filtering of images, etc.