Photonic systems for high-performance information processing have attracted renewed interest. Neuromorphic silicon photonics has the potential to integrate processing functions that vastly exceed the capabilities of electronics. We report first observations of a recurrent silicon photonic neural network, in which connections are configured by microring weight banks. A mathematical isomorphism between the silicon photonic circuit and a continuous neural network model is demonstrated through dynamical bifurcation analysis. Exploiting this isomorphism, a simulated 24-node silicon photonic neural network is programmed using “neural compiler” to solve a differential system emulation task. A 294-fold acceleration against a conventional benchmark is predicted. We also propose and derive power consumption analysis for modulator-class neurons that, as opposed to laser-class neurons, are compatible with silicon photonic platforms. At increased scale, Neuromorphic silicon photonics could access new regimes of ultrafast information processing for radio, control, and scientific computing.

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It has long been known that photonic communication can alleviate the data movement bottlenecks that plague conventional microelectronic processors. More recently, there has also been interest in its capabilities to implement low precision linear operations, such as matrix multiplications, fast and efficiently. We characterize the performance of photonic and electronic hardware underlying neural network models using multiply-accumulate operations. First, we investigate the limits of analog electronic crossbar arrays and on-chip photonic linear computing systems. Photonic processors are shown to have advantages in the limit of large processor sizes (>100 µm), large vector sizes (N > 500), and low noise precision (≤4 bits). We discuss several proposed tunable photonic MAC systems, and provide a concrete comparison between deep learning and photonic hardware using several empiricallyvalidated device and system models. We show significant potential improvements over digital electronics in energy (>10 2), speed (>10 3), and compute density (>10 2). Index Terms-Artificial intelligence, neural networks, analog computers, analog processing circuits, optical computing. I. INTRODUCTION P HOTONICS has been well studied for its role in communication systems. Fiber optic links currently form the backbone of the world's telecommunications infrastructure, vastly overshadowing the best electronic communication standards in information capacity. Light signals have many advantageous properties for the transfer of information. For one, a photonic waveguide, with diameters ranging from those in fiber (∼80 μm) to those fabricated on-chip (∼500 nm), can carry information at enormous bandwidth densities-i.e., terabits per secondwith an energy efficiency that scales nearly independent of distance. This density is possible thanks to signal parallelization in photonic waveguides, in which hundreds of high speed, multiplexed channels can be independently modulated and detected. Photonic channels also experience less distortion, jitter,

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