LightPro: A Linear Photonic Processor with Full Programmability
Amin Shafiee, Zahra Ghanaatian, Benoit Charbonnier, Mahdi Nikdast

TL;DR
LightPro is a fully programmable, scalable silicon photonic processor that uses phase-change materials for dynamic control, optimized via neural architecture search, achieving significant reductions in size and power with high accuracy in AI tasks.
Contribution
The paper introduces a novel fully programmable photonic processor with phase-change material-based tunable couplers and optimized architecture, advancing photonic AI hardware capabilities.
Findings
Achieves up to 85% footprint reduction
Over 50% power consumption improvement
Less than 5% accuracy drop in neural network inference
Abstract
In this paper, we propose a novel fully programmable linear photonic processor, which we call LightPro, with improved scalability, performance, and footprint. At the heart of LightPro are compact, low-loss, and programmable silicon photonic (SiPh) directional coupler (DC) devices that deploy phase-change material (PCM) for programming the DC's splitting ratio. By thermally inducing phase transitions in the PCM, the coupling coefficient of the DC can be dynamically adjusted to achieve different splitting ratios in the device output. Building on this device foundation, we develop a neural architecture search (NAS) and pruning algorithm to optimize the architecture of the processor for performing MVM operations. Our simulation results show that LightPro achieves up to an 85% reduction in footprint and more than 50% improvement in power consumption. In addition, LightPro is evaluated by…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsNeural Networks and Reservoir Computing · Photonic and Optical Devices · Optical Network Technologies
