Journal article
Partial coherence enhances parallelized photonic computing
- Abstract:
- Advancements in optical coherence control have unlocked a plethora of cutting-edge applications, including long-haul communication, light detection and ranging, and optical coherence tomography. Prevailing wisdom suggests that using more coherent light sources leads to enhanced system performance and device functionalities. Our study introduces a photonic convolutional processing system that capitalizes on partially coherent light to boost computing parallelism without substantially sacrificing accuracy, potentially enabling larger-size photonic tensor cores. The reduction of the degree of coherence optimizes bandwidth utilization in the photonic convolutional processing system. This breakthrough challenges the traditional belief that coherence is essential or even advantageous in integrated photonic accelerators, thereby enabling the employment of light sources with less rigorous feedback control and thermal management requirements for high-throughput photonic computing. We demonstrate such a system in two photonic platforms for computing applications: a photonic tensor core using phase-change material photonic memories that delivers parallel convolution operations to classify gaits of ten Parkinson’s disease patients with a 92.2% accuracy (92.7% theoretically), and a silicon photonic tensor core with embedded electroabsorption modulators (EAM) to facilitate 0.108 tera operations per second (TOPS) convolutional processing for classifying MNIST handwritten digits dataset with a 92.4% accuracy (95.0% theoretically).
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Authors
+ Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
More from this funder
- Grant:
- EP/J018694/1
- EP/W022931/1 - 121607R
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature More from this journal
- Volume:
- 632
- Issue:
- 8023
- Pages:
- 55–62
- Acceptance date:
- 2024-05-17
- EISSN:
-
1476-4687
- ISSN:
-
0028-0836
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
2001214
- Local pid:
-
pubs:2001214
- Deposit date:
-
2024-05-28
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Dong et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2024
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Notes:
- This article has been accepted for publication in Nature.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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