Convolution neural network (CNN), as one of the most powerful and popular technologies, has achieved remarkable progress for image and video classification since its invention in 1989. However, with the high definition video-data explosion, convolution layers in the CNN architecture will occupy a great amount of computing time and memory resources due to high computation complexity of matrix multiply accumulate operation. In this paper, a novel integrated photonic CNN is proposed based on double correlation operations through interleaved time-wavelength modulation. Micro-ring based multi-wavelength manipulation and single dispersion medium are utilized to realize convolution operation and replace the conventional optical delay lines. 200 images are tested in MNIST datasets with accuracy of 85.5% in our photonic CNN versus 86.5% in 64-bit computer.We also analyze the computing error of photonic CNN caused by various micro-ring parameters, operation baud rates and the characteristics of micro-ring weighting bank. Furthermore, a tensor processing unit based on 4x4 mesh with 1.2 TOPS (operation per second when 100% utilization) computing capability at 20G baud rate is proposed and analyzed to form a paralleled photonic CNN.
In this work we numerically analyze a passive photonic integrated neuromorphic accelerator based on hardware-friendly optical spectrum slicing nodes. The proposed scheme can act as a fully analogue convolutional layer, preprocessing information directly in the optical domain. The proposed scheme allows the extraction of meaningful spatio-temporal features from the incoming data, thus when used prior to a simple fully connected digital single layer network it can boost performance with negligible power consumption. Numerical simulations using the MNIST dataset confirmed the acceleration propert…
The technologically-relevant task of feature extraction from data performed in deep-learning systems is routinely accomplished as repeated fast Fourier transforms (FFT) electronically in prevalent domain-specific architectures such as in graphics processing units (GPUs). However, electronics systems are limited with respect to power dissipation and delay, both, due to wire-charging challenges related to interconnect capacitance. Here we present a silicon photonics-based architecture for convolutional neural networks that harnesses the phase property of light to perform FFTs efficiently by exec…
With the proliferation of ultra-high-speed mobile networks and internet-connected devices, along with the rise of artificial intelligence, the world is generating exponentially increasing amounts of data - data that needs to be processed in a fast, efficient and smart way. These developments are pushing the limits of existing computing paradigms, and highly parallelized, fast and scalable hardware concepts are becoming progressively more important. Here, we demonstrate a computational specific integrated photonic tensor core - the optical analog of an ASIC-capable of operating at Tera-Multiply…
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been the centerpiece of many applications including but not limited to computer vision, speech processing, and Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, the computationally expensive convolution operations impose many challenges to the performance and scalability of CNNs. In parallel, photonic systems, which are traditionally employed for data communication, have enjoyed recent popularity for data processing due to their high bandwidth, low power consumption, and reconfigurability. Here we propose a Photonic Convolutional Neural Network Accelerator (P…
Tensor analytics lays mathematical basis for the prosperous promotion of multiway signal processing. To increase computing throughput, mainstream processors transform tensor convolutions to matrix multiplications to enhance parallelism of computing. However, such order-reducing transformation produces data duplicates and consumes additional memory. Here, we demonstrate an integrated photonic tensor flow processor without tensor-matrix transformation, which outputs the convolved tensor as the input tensor 'flows' through the processor. The hybrid manipulation of optical dimensions of wavelength…
Neural Networks (NNs) have become the mainstream technology in the artificial intelligence (AI) renaissance over the past decade. Among different types of neural networks, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely adopted as they have achieved leading results in many fields such as computer vision and speech recognition. This success in part is due to the widespread availability of capable underlying hardware platforms. Applications have always been a driving factor for design of such hardware architectures. Hardware specialization can expose us to novel architectural solutions, wh…
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；The George Washington University（乔治华盛顿大学）
The last few years have seen a lot of work to address the challenge of low-latency and high-throughput convolutional neural network inference. Integrated photonics has the potential to dramatically accelerate neural networks because of its low-latency nature. Combined with the concept of Joint Transform Correlator (JTC), the computationally expensive convolution functions can be computed instantaneously (time of flight of light) with almost no cost. This 'free' convolution computation provides the theoretical basis of the proposed PhotoFourier JTC-based CNN accelerator. PhotoFourier addresses …
The parallelism of optics and the miniaturization of optical components using nanophotonic structures, such as metasurfaces present a compelling alternative to electronic implementations of convolutional neural networks. The lack of a low-power optical nonlinearity, however, requires slow and energy-inefficient conversions between the electronic and optical domains. Here, we design an architecture which utilizes a single electrical to optical conversion by designing a free-space optical frontend unit that implements the linear operations of the first layer with the subsequent layers realized e…
Photonic waveguides are prime candidates for integrated and parallel photonic interconnects. Such interconnects correspond to large-scale vector matrix products, which are at the heart of neural network computation. However, parallel interconnect circuits realized in two dimensions, for example by lithography, are strongly limited in size due to disadvantageous scaling. We use three dimensional (3D) printed photonic waveguides to overcome this limitation. 3D optical-couplers with fractal topology efficiently connect large numbers of input and output channels, and we show that the substrate's f…
Convolutional neural networks have become an essential element of spatial deep learning systems. In the prevailing architecture, the convolution operation is performed with Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) electronically in GPUs. The parallelism of GPUs provides an efficiency over CPUs, however both approaches being electronic are bound by the speed and power limits of the interconnect delay inside the circuits. Here we present a silicon photonics based architecture for convolutional neural networks that harnesses the phase property of light to perform FFTs efficiently. Our all-optical FFT is bas…
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a class of Artificial Neural Networks(ANNs) that employ the method of convolving input images with filter-kernels for object recognition and classification purposes. In this paper, we propose a photonics circuit architecture which could consume a fraction of energy per inference compared with state of the art electronics.
Residue number system (RNS) enables dimensionality reduction of an arithmetic problem by representing a large number as a set of smaller integers, where the number is decomposed by prime number factorization using the moduli as basic functions. These reduced problem sets can then be processed independently and in parallel, thus improving computational efficiency and speed. Here we show an optical RNS hardware representation based on integrated nanophotonics. The digit-wise shifting in RNS arithmetic is expressed as spatial routing of an optical signal in 2x2 hybrid photonic-plasmonic switches.…
UC San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）；Micron Technology（美光科技）；Colorado State University（科罗拉多州立大学）；Texas A&M University（得克萨斯A&M大学）
Training deep learning networks involves continuous weight updates across the various layers of the deep network while using a backpropagation algorithm (BP). This results in expensive computation overheads during training. Consequently, most deep learning accelerators today employ pre-trained weights and focus only on improving the design of the inference phase. The recent trend is to build a complete deep learning accelerator by incorporating the training module. Such efforts require an ultra-fast chip architecture for executing the BP algorithm. In this article, we propose a novel photonics…
The acceleration of a CNN inference task uses convolution operations that are typically transformed into vector-dot-product (VDP) operations. Several photonic microring resonators (MRRs) based hardware architectures have been proposed to accelerate integer-quantized CNNs with remarkably higher throughput and energy efficiency compared to their electronic counterparts. However, the existing photonic MRR-based analog accelerators exhibit a very strong trade-off between the achievable input/weight precision and VDP operation size, which severely restricts their achievable VDP operation size for t…
