SUANPAN: Scalable Photonic Linear Vector Machine

Abstract

Photonic linear operation is a promising approach to handle the extensive vector multiplications in artificial intelligence techniques due to the natural bosonic parallelism and high-speed information transmission of photonics. Although it is believed that maximizing the interaction of the light beams is necessary to fully utilize the parallelism and tremendous efforts have been made in past decades, the achieved dimensionality of vector-matrix multiplication is very limited due to the difficulty of scaling up a tightly interconnected or highly coupled optical system. Additionally, there is still a lack of a universal photonic computing architecture that can be readily merged with existing computing system to meet the computing power demand of AI techniques. Here, we propose a programmable and reconfigurable photonic linear vector machine to perform only the inner product of two vectors, formed by a series of independent basic computing units, while each unit is just one pair of light-emitter and photodetector. Since there is no interaction among light beams inside, extreme scalability could be achieved by simply duplicating the independent basic computing unit while there is no requirement of large-scale analog-to-digital converter and digital-to-analog converter arrays. Our architecture is inspired by the traditional Chinese Suanpan or abacus and thus is denoted as photonic SUANPAN. As a proof of principle, SUANPAN architecture is implemented with an 8*8 vertical cavity surface emission laser array and an 8*8 MoTe2 two-dimensional material photodetector array. We believe that our proposed photonic SUANPAN is capable of serving as a fundamental linear vector machine that can be readily merged with existing electronic digital computing system and is potential to enhance the computing power for future various AI applications.

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