OptiLookUp: An Optical ROM-Based Lookup Table Engine for Photonic Accelerators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-speed, reconfigurable optical ROM architecture using integrated microring resonators, enabling deterministic data lookup for photonic accelerators with high bandwidth and low latency.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated photonic ROM design with spectral encoding, banked sub-arrays, and transistor-based selectors, enhancing scalability and reconfigurability.

Findings

Reliable operation at data rates up to 12.5 GHz

Spectral encoding enables deterministic lookup operations

Reconfigurability achieved via transistor-based optical selectors

Abstract

Read-only memory (ROM) provides deterministic access to predefined data mappings. Extending ROM concepts to the optical domain enables high-bandwidth, low-latency, and parallel memory access, but realizing compact and reconfigurable optical ROM remains challenging due to loss, wavelength control, and integration constraints. This work presents a high-speed, reconfigurable photonic ROM architecture implemented using integrated microring resonators (MRRs). The ROM encodes predefined input-output mappings directly in the spectral response of the photonic devices, enabling deterministic lookup-based operation without dynamic computation during readout. To improve scalability and reduce cumulative insertion loss, the architecture employs compact banked sub-arrays that are selectively addressed through an optical decoding mechanism. Reconfigurability is achieved using transistor-based optical selectors, allowing different ROM banks to be activated without physical light rerouting or interferometric structures. The proposed photonic ROM is designed and evaluated using device-level simulations based on the GlobalFoundries 45SPCLO silicon photonics platform. Simulation results demonstrate reliable operation at data rates up to 12.5 GHz, with stable light-to-current transfer characteristics obtained through integrated photodiode readout. The optical ROM can be used to implement nonlinear activation functions utilised in photonic accelerator architectures, including sigmoid, tanh, ReLU, and exponential mappings.