Optical higher-order negabinary addition is investigated for fast operation. A new method for recognizing multiple reference patterns in a channel is presented, and thus the substitution rules are logically minimized, resulting in fewer channels for processing. A content-addressable-memory based incoherent optoelectronic symbolic substitution architecture is proposed. The system is simple and flexible, and the multi-channel operations for all the modules are performed in parallel. An experiment is demonstrated.
