For the first time, an international cadre of electrical engineers has developed a new method for photonic in-memory computing that could make optical computing a reality in the near future.
The team includes researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering, the University of California—Santa Barbara, the University of Cagliari, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology (now the Institute of Science Tokyo). Their results were published today in the journal Nature Photonics titled "Integrated non-reciprocal magneto-optics with ultra-high endurance for photonic in-memory computing."
This research has been a collaborative effort jointly coordinated by Nathan Youngblood, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Pitt, together with Paulo Pintus, previously at UC Santa Barbara and now assistant professor at the University of Cagliari, Italy; and Yuya Shoji, associate professor at the Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan.
Until now, researchers have been limited in developing photonic memory for AI processing—gaining one important attribute like speed while sacrificing another like energy usage. In the article, the international team demonstrates a unique solution that addresses current limitations of optical memory that have yet to combine non-volatility, multibit storage, high switching speed, low switching energy, and high endurance in a single platform.
"The materials we use in developing these cells have been available for decades. However, they have primarily been used for static optical applications, such as on-chip isolators rather than a platform for high performance photonic memory," Youngblood explained.
"This discovery is a key enabling technology toward a faster, more efficient, and more scalable optical computing architecture that can be directly programmed with CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) circuitry—which means it can be integrated into today's computer technology.
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