Energy Efficient Computing with Chip-Based Photonics

Amidst today's data explosion, demand for computing power is accelerating, and the energy requirements for solving critical problems in science, engineering, business, and intelligent processing are increasing dramatically. In order to address this critical issue, the scientific and engineering community is beginning to explore new approaches to computing, such as mimicking the brain's structure or the dynamical behavior of coupled particles. However, implementing these approaches with conventional computer architectures is highly inefficient from both energy and computing standpoints. As a result, there is a pressing need to develop revolutionary computer architectures that overcome these severe roadblocks. An ambitious program is to be pursued within the framework of this project in which light, rather than electrons, is used to realize new computing paradigms with superior energy scalability. Specifically, computing architectures will be explored that exploit the wave nature of light (i.e., its amplitude and phase) harnessing the remarkable advancements over the past decade in nanofabrication of complex photonic chips with thousands of high-performance devices. These photonic platforms would have the potential to be computationally powerful, operate with unparalleled energy efficiency, and are scalable and highly reconfigurable.

To fulfill this vision of energy efficient photonic computing, the proposed research efforts will focus on the following two types of photonic processors: (1) Ising Machine and (2) Neuromorphic Computing Machine. The unifying aspect of these photonic processors is that they consist of dynamic networks of coupled photonic units and rely on the wave nature of light to solve problems which has no analogy in electron-based computing systems. Beyond developing new types of optical processors, photonics technology will be developed as the cornerstone of future computer systems. A novel architecture will be explored that integrates photonic processors and interconnects with electronic memory and processors to maximize the benefits of each technology. Research will also be undertaken to map complete, challenging problems to combinations of photonic accelerators and electronic processors, and to determine how to best scale them to maximize full-system performance. By innovating at all levels of the system - from devices to architectures including systems, compilers, and algorithms - the project would aim to achieve advances that cannot be realized within any single field.