A Comparative Analysis of Microrings Based Incoherent Photonic GEMM Accelerators

Several microring resonator (MRR) based analog photonic architectures have been proposed to accelerate general matrix-matrix multiplications (GEMMs) in deep neural networks with exceptional throughput and energy efficiency. To implement GEMM functions, these MRR-based architectures, in general, manipulate optical signals in five different ways: (i) Splitting (copying) of multiple optical signals to achieve a certain fan-out, (ii) Aggregation (multiplexing) of multiple optical signals to achieve a certain fan-in, (iii) Modulation of optical signals to imprint input values onto analog signal amplitude, …

accelerators analog analysis architectures comparative analysis cs.ar cs.et cs.lg cs.ne efficiency energy energy efficiency five functions general matrix multiple networks neural networks optical