We review some of the basic principles, fundamentals, technologies, architectures and recent advances leading to thefor the implementation of Field Programmable Photonic Field Arrays (FPPGAs).
Programmable photonic circuits of reconfigurable interferometers can be used to implement arbitrary operations on optical modes, facilitating a flexible platform for accelerating tasks in quantum simulation, signal processing, and artificial intelligence. A major obstacle to scaling up these systems is static fabrication error, where small component errors within each device accrue to produce significant errors within the circuit computation. Mitigating this error usually requires numerical optimization dependent on real-time feedback from the circuit, which can greatly limit the scalability o…
Component errors limit the scaling of programmable coherent photonic circuits. These errors arise because the standard tunable photonic coupler -- the Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) -- cannot be perfectly programmed to the cross state. Here, we introduce two modified circuit architectures that overcome this limitation: (1) a 3-splitter MZI mesh for generic errors, and (2) a broadband MZI+Crossing design for correlated errors. Because these designs allow for perfect realization of the cross state, the matrix fidelity no longer decreases with mesh size, allowing scaling to arbitrarily large m…
Digital electronics is a technological cornerstone in our modern society which has covered the increasing demand in computing power during the last decades thanks to a periodic doubling of transistor density and power efficiency in integrated circuits. Currently, such scaling laws are reaching their fundamental limits, leading to the emergence of a large gamut of applications that cannot be supported by digital electronics, specifically, those that involve real time analog multi-data processing, e.g., medical diagnostic imaging, robotic control and remote sensing, among others. In this scenari…
Linear light processing functions (e.g., routing, splitting, filtering) are key functions requiring configuration to implement on a programmable photonic integrated circuit (PPIC). In recirculating waveguide meshes (which include loop-backs), this is usually done manually. Some previous results describe explorations to perform this task automatically, but their efficiency or applicability is still limited. In this paper, we propose an efficient method that can automatically realize configurations for many light processing functions on a square-mesh PPIC. At its heart is an automatic differenti…
This paper proposes the implementation of programmable threshold logic gate (TLG) crossbar array based on modified TLG cells for high speed processing and computation. The proposed TLG array operation does not depend on input signal and time pulses, comparing to the existing architectures. The circuit is implemented using TSMC $180nm$ CMOS technology. The on-chip area and power dissipation of the simulated $3\times 4$ TLG array is $1463 μm^2$ and $425 μW$, respectively.
With photonics, the quantum computational advantage has been demonstrated on the task of boson sampling. Next, developing quantum-enhanced approaches for practical problems becomes one of the top priorities for photonic systems. Quantum walks are powerful kernels for developing new and useful quantum algorithms. Here we realize large-scale quantum walks using a fully programmable photonic quantum computing system. The system integrates a silicon quantum photonic chip, enabling the simulation of quantum walk dynamics on graphs with up to 400 vertices and possessing full programmability over qua…