With an ongoing trend in computing hardware towards increased heterogeneity, domain-specific co-processors are emerging as alternatives to centralized paradigms. The tensor core unit (TPU) has shown to outperform graphic process units by almost 3-orders of magnitude enabled by higher signal throughout and energy efficiency. In this context, photons bear a number of synergistic physical properties while phase-change materials allow for local nonvolatile mnemonic functionality in these emerging distributed non van-Neumann architectures. While several photonic neural network designs have been explored, a photonic TPU to perform matrix vector multiplication and summation is yet outstanding. Here we introduced an integrated photonics-based TPU by strategically utilizing a) photonic parallelism via wavelength division multiplexing, b) high 2 Peta-operations-per second throughputs enabled by 10s of picosecond-short delays from optoelectronics and compact photonic integrated circuitry, and c) zero power-consuming novel photonic multi-state memories based on phase-change materials featuring vanishing losses in the amorphous state. Combining these physical synergies of material, function, and system, we show that the performance of this 8-bit photonic TPU can be 2-3 orders higher compared to an electrical TPU whilst featuring similar chip areas. This work shows that photonic specialized processors have the potential to augment electronic systems and may perform exceptionally well in network-edge devices in the looming 5G networks and beyond.

介绍了一种用于矩阵向量乘法和求和的集成光子学TPU，通过利用波长分割复用、纳秒级延迟和基于相变材料的光学多态存储器，结合这些材料、功能和系统的物理协同作用，展示了这种8位光子TPU的性能比电子TPU高2-3个数量级，而占用的芯片面积类似，表明光子专用处理器在增强电子系统方面具有潜力，并且在即将到来的5G网络及其后面的网络边缘设备中表现特别出色。

用于机器学习的光子张量核心