Digital Photonics and Nanophotonics

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Memory Access Solutions for Photonic Computing Applications

With further development in interconnection technology and computing performance approaching the peta-flops regime, new challenges in data center networking infrastructure are bound to occur, since the improvement in the processor throughput is fast outpacing the improvement in memory speeds. The electronics storage system, the RAM, has proven to be incapable of making pace with current trends of improvements in processing speeds. We develop memory access solutions using photonics to help bridge the gap between processing speed and memory access speed to improve the overall performance of the computer system.

                                    

  

      10 Gbps All-optical memory access solution

 

Photonic Integrated Circuits for Photonic Computing Systems

All-optical network of photonic integrated circuits promises a future of stronger, more economical, and more flexible communication, sensing, biophotonic and optical signal processing systems. Silicon photonics use laser light to transfer data among computer chips for what is called “computing at the speed of light”. Optical rays can carry more data and can transfer data faster than electrical semiconductors. We explore, develop and analyze contemporary photonic integrated circuits and structures that would pave the way towards the realization of all-optical photonic computing systems. Some topics include:

  • Silicon Photonics Based All-optical Logic Gates
  • Silicon Photonics Based half-adder, full  adder, comparator, 2x4 decoder, 4x2 encoder, SR Latch design
  • Dot Product Operator for Photonic and Edge Computing Applications
  • On-Chip Optical Fast Fourier Transforms (OFFTs) for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)
  • Photonic Integrated Circuit Solutions for Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM), Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Spiking Neural Networks (SNN)

 

 

 

Schematic of Device Performing OR/NOR Logic

Schematic of Device Performing AND/NAND Logic
 

Nanophotonic Sensors

All-optical network of photonic integrated circuits promises a future of stronger, more economical, and more flexible communication, sensing, biophotonic and optical signal processing systems. In this project, we explore, develop and analyze contemporary nanophotonic structures to achieve low-cost and compact sensor systems. Some topics include:

•Accelerometer for displacement sensing applications
•Silicon Photonics Based sensors
•Biosensors
•MIR Gas sensors
•Si-based hydrophones