Design and Implementation of an Optical Page Oriented Virtual Memory for a Personal Computer

Abstract

Hierarchical memory systems have been an integral part of computer system design for nearly three decades. In modern personal computer systems, the virtual address space of a process is implemented on a swapping disk which is at the bottom of a hierarchy consisting of a primary memory and multiple cache levels. This paper describes an alternative to this design that implements an optoelectronic (OE) memory hierarchy in which the virtual address space of a process is implemented in an optical page oriented memory. The primary advantage of this structure is the reduction in average memory access time enabled by the parallelism which is inherent in free space transfers of optical memory pages.