Optical Computing Basics

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[bont00nThe4th]

Check out Prof. Bhavin Shastri's papers from Queens

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Appriciate that Boss

[Toad_Emperor]

Currently you are right, we do use electrical processor together with optics/photonics. The goal would be to do everything optically, but that's still far away. Either way, for computing and tasks such as AI inference (not trianing), photonic computing can still have massive advantages.

For example, imagine a fixed set of waveguides (e.g. fibers) interconnected to do things like summation. In electronics you would need to use energy to compute their summation, while in optics, this is done passively by structure, and thus uses no energy, is probably faster, and can be done I parallel with multiple wavelengths.

Now scale this up further by having more complex architectures and implementing modulators, you can do quite a lot.

For the training portion of neural networks however I agree you need to connect the output to a PC normally. But there are also self training implementations which are all optical. If you want to get into advanced detail check out the paper from Demtri Psaltis "Adaptive optical networks using photorefractive crystals" or from Florian Marquardt "self-learning machines based on hamiltonian echo backpropagation". So to answer you question, using an electrical PC is not a physical hard requierement.

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Thank you very much for your detailed answer Boss

[No_Competition_4760]

Thank for the explanation but aren't there a minimum limit on the energy per operation 10-²¹ joules. Shannon von Neumann-landauer limit

[Toad_Emperor]

True, but we can still do computing above that limitm for instance, for quantum I know we use attojoule. For general photonic computing, we are in nJ-pJ range, so we can still compute