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Photons instead of electrons for revolutionary processors

18.01.2021

Modern computing capabilities of classical processor architectures have exhausted themselves, IBM is sure. Moreover, they have become an obstacle to the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence systems. A breakthrough is seen in the development of silicon photonics and memory computing, where data is processed where it is stored. And today, IBM proved that they have found the way to the electronics of the future, in which photons will fly through circuits instead of electrons.

IBM teamed up with scientists from several countries to develop and implement an optical computing system to accelerate neural networks. In particular, the company created a "photonic tensor core" that is capable of performing the so-called convolution operation - a mathematical operation on two functions that outputs a third function - in one time step. This is usually a simple addition or multiplication, but processing a single piece of data requires billions of such operations, so low latency and low consumption are vital requirements for such systems.

Performing operations on data in memory is an additional opportunity to save both consumption and latency, since data does not need to be transferred to the processor and back. In IBM's design, data was stored and processed in memory cells based on phase change memory.

The next step to speed up data processing is Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM). In other words, the data was sent to the memory block in the form of light with different wavelengths. This approach allows both expanding the data transmission channel (frequency expansion) and performing operations on the photon data stream in parallel. Where electrons flowed sequentially in circuits, photonic circuits allow parallel flow of data and simultaneous processing of each of the flows. This is a huge speedup of data processing!

As an experiment, a 9 x 4 matrix was created with a maximum of four input vectors per time step, each of which was transmitted as light radiation with a different wavelength. For MAC (multiply-accumulate) operations, the matrix showed a performance of 2 TOPS/s at a modulation rate of 14 GHz. IBM expects that the proposed circuit design will help achieve in-memory performance of photonic circuits at levels of PetaMAC/s per mm2 (thousands of trillions of MAC operations), which is three orders of magnitude higher than today's 1 TOPS/mm2 level for current electronics.

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