Special-purpose computer HORN-5 for a real-time electroholography

In electroholography, a real-time reconstruction is one of the grand challenges. To realize it, we developed a parallelized high-performance computing board for computer-generated hologram, named HORN-5 board, where four large-scale field programmable gate array chips were mounted. The number of circuits for hologram calculation implemented to the board was 1,408. The board calculated a hologram at higher speed by 360 times than a personal computer with Pentium4 processor. A personal computer connected with four HORN-5 boards calculated a hologram of 1,408 x 1,050 made from a three-dimensional object consisting of 10,000 points at 0.0023 s. In other words, beyond at video rate (30 frames / s), it realized a real-time reconstruction. (C) 2005 Optical Society of America.