Building a photonic tensor core unit with an electronic interface for convolution processing

Abstract

With huge amounts of data being generated every second, the demand for parallelized, high speed, and efficient computing power is rising rapidly, pushing the limits of existing computing paradigms. In this circumstance, photonic computing hardware is a promising alternative to conventional electronics with prospects of speed and remarkably power efficient at accelerating multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations. Moreover, optical computing enables massive parallelism over their electronic counter parts through wavelength division multiplexing. This work involves the design and fabrication of an integrated photonic tensor core (PTC) capable of performing 60 millon MAC operations per second. Optical computing hardware makes use of multiple electro-optic and digital-analog converters. This work also involves the design and characterisation of a dedicated electronic interface to feed data to the PTC. In order to demonstrate the application potential, we perform convolution processing on 2D images in the optical domain with the newly developed hardware.