Democratizing Electronic-Photonic AI Systems: An Open-Source AI-Infused Cross-Layer Co-Design and Design Automation Toolflow

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open-source, cross-layer co-design framework and automation tools to simplify and accelerate the development of electronic-photonic AI systems, fostering broader innovation and deployment.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive open-source design automation toolchain and novel methodologies for scalable photonic AI system design and evaluation, addressing current challenges in the field.

Findings

Development of SimPhony for rapid system evaluation

Implementation of AI-enabled photonic design automation techniques

Demonstration of scalable architectures for photonic edge AI and Transformer inference

Abstract

Photonics is becoming a cornerstone technology for high-performance AI systems and scientific computing, offering unparalleled speed, parallelism, and energy efficiency. Despite this promise, the design and deployment of electronic-photonic AI systems remain highly challenging due to a steep learning curve across multiple layers, spanning device physics, circuit design, system architecture, and AI algorithms. The absence of a mature electronic-photonic design automation (EPDA) toolchain leads to long, inefficient design cycles and limits cross-disciplinary innovation and co-evolution. In this work, we present a cross-layer co-design and automation framework aimed at democratizing photonic AI system development. We begin by introducing our architecture designs for scalable photonic edge AI and Transformer inference, followed by SimPhony, an open-source modeling tool for rapid EPIC AI system evaluation and design-space exploration. We then highlight advances in AI-enabled photonic design automation, including physical AI-based Maxwell solvers, a fabrication-aware inverse design framework, and a scalable inverse training algorithm for meta-optical neural networks, enabling a scalable EPDA stack for next-generation electronic-photonic AI systems.