A Chip That Can Process and Classify Nearly Two Billion Images per Second

Good news! Impressive! The future of photonic computation, a new computing paradigm! This could be a breakthrough, the first end-to-end system!

"... have removed the four main time-consuming culprits in the traditional computer chip: the conversion of optical to electrical signals, the need for converting the input data to binary format, a large memory module, and clock-based computations.
They have achieved this through direct processing of light received from the object of interest using an optical deep neural network implemented on a 9.3 square millimeter chip. ...
“When current computer chips process electrical signals they often run them through a Graphics Processing Unit, or GPU, which takes up space and energy,” ... “Our chip does not need to store the information, eliminating the need for a large memory unit. ...
“What’s really interesting about this technology is that it can do so much more than classify images,” ... “We already know how to convert many data types into the electrical domain – images, audio, speech, and many other data types. Now, we can convert different data types into the optical domain and have them processed almost instantaneously using this technology.” ...”

“And, by eliminating the memory unit that stores images, we are also increasing data privacy,” ..."

From the abstract:
"... In the optical domain, despite advances in photonic computation, the lack of scalable on-chip optical non-linearity and the loss of photonic devices limit the scalability of optical deep networks. Here we report an integrated end-to-end photonic deep neural network (PDNN) that performs sub-nanosecond image classification through direct processing of the optical waves impinging on the on-chip pixel array as they propagate through layers of neurons. In each neuron, linear computation is performed optically and the non-linear activation function is realized opto-electronically, allowing a classification time of under 570 ps, which is comparable with a single clock cycle of state-of-the-art digital platforms. A uniformly distributed supply light provides the same per-neuron optical output range, allowing scalability to large-scale PDNNs.  ..."

Penn Engineers Create Chip That Can Process and Classify Nearly Two Billion Images per Second

An on-chip photonic deep neural network for image classification (no public access)