In the emerging Internet of things cyber-physical system-embedded society, big data analytics needs huge computing capability with better energy efficiency. Coming to the end of Moore’s law of the electronic integrated circuit and facing the throughput limitation in parallel processing governed by Amdahl’s law, there is a strong motivation behind exploring a novel frontier of data processing in post-Moore era. Optical fiber transmissions have been making a remarkable advance over the last three decades. A record aggregated transmission capacity of the wavelength division multiplexing system per a single-mode fiber has reached 115 Tbit/s over 240 km. It is time to turn our attention to data processing by photons from the data transport by photons. A photonic accelerator (PAXEL) is a special class of processor placed at the front end of a digital computer, which is optimized to perform a specific function but does so faster with less power consumption than an electronic general-purpose processor. It can process images or time-serial data either in an analog or digital fashion on a real-time basis. Having had maturing manufacturing technology of optoelectronic devices and a diverse array of computing architectures at hand, prototyping PAXEL becomes feasible by leveraging on, e.g., cutting-edge miniature and power-efficient nanostructured silicon photonic devices. In this article, first the bottleneck and the paradigm shift of digital computing are reviewed. Next, we review an array of PAXEL architectures and applications, including artificial neural networks, reservoir computing, pass-gate logic, decision making, and compressed sensing. We assess the potential advantages and challenges for each of these PAXEL approaches to highlight the scope for future work toward practical implementation.

No abstract

No abstract

Lightwave networks realized through code division multiple access techniques are extensively studied to determine their ultimate capabilities. Here, these concepts are extended to network implementation by introducing an optical code division multiplexing (OCDM) multihop strategy using optical coding. It is shown that this approach is effective in scaling up existing wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks without a significant drain of the wavelength resource. The concept of a virtual optical code path (VOCP) is introduced within the transport layer of the network. It is demonstrated that this is a potential solution to wavelength path (WP) allocation problems which may plague WDM based transport networks of the future. Crucial to the VOCP concept is optical code conversion. The interplay between this added functionality and the optical cross-connect is highlighted; the optical cross-connect serves to establish VOCP/VWP (virtual wavelength path) in the hybrid transport layer. An example of optical code conversion is introduced. It is based on coherent OCDM principles in which bipolar phase-shift keyed (PSK) optical pulse sequences are used as the signature codes. Error-free code conversion using a four-chip optical encoder/decoder is successfully performed at 1.24 Gbit/s. The results show the feasibility of high bit rate OCDM transmission with optical code conversion.