PHM 953: SELF STUDY COURSE

Neuromorphic Photonics
 Presentation 1: Introduction to spiking and excitability.
Presentation 2: Semiconductor Photonic devices as

excitable processors: part 1.

Presentation 3: Semiconductor photonic devices as

excitable processors part 2.

Presentation 4: Comparison of electronic and photonic

platforms for neuromorphic engineering.

Supervisor: Prof. Sukhdev Roy Presented By: Rama Chaudhary

Deptt. Of Physics and Comp. Science Roll No:1807603
 Neuromorphic Photonics
 Introduction to spiking and excitability : The basic spiking neuron model and
excitability mechanisms were discussed.

 Semiconductor Photonic devices as excitable processors-part 1 : Four excitable

systems, two section gain and SA laser, Semiconductor ring laser, Microdisk laser
and 2D photonic crystal nanocavity were discussed.

 Semiconductor Photonic devices as excitable processors-part 2 : The remaining

excitable systems i.e. resonant tunneling diode PD & LD, Injection based SC laser
with delayed feedback and polarization switching VCSELs were discussed.

 Comparison of electronic and photonic platforms for neuromorphic

engineering : Comparison between electronic and photonic platforms for
neuromorphic engineering was discussed on the basis of architecture, speed, power
efficiency, size and networking.
Neuromorphic Photonics
 Understanding the Word
Neuro + morphic + Photonics
Human brain is Morphology is Photonics is
most complex study of how science of
and efficient things are put generation,
computing unit. together. It detection and
It inspire many implies science manipulation of
scientist to of connecting light. It has
mimic its two different revolutionized
behaviour. fields. the life.
 Definition
 Thismeans that Neuromorphic
photonics is branch of photonics
which aims to build machines
employing basic nervous system
operations by bridging the physics of
biology with engineering.

P.R. Prucnal & B.J. Shastri. Neuromorphic Photonics , CRC

Press Taylor and Francis group, 2017
 Advantages
It promises:

 To make processor that work with low

energies
 Integration of massive information
 Capability of unsupervised learning
 Co-location of memory and processing
 Hybrid analog digital signal processing.
P.R. Prucnal & B.J. Shastri. Neuromorphic Photonics , CRC
Press Taylor and Francis group, 2017
Neuromorphic Photonics
Comparison of Electronic and Photonic Platforms for
Neuromorphic Engineering
 Outlines
 Introduction
 Technology Comparison
 Electronic And Photonic Architecture
 Speed: Bandwidth And Latency
 Power Consumption: Energy And Noise
 Size: Device Density And Scalability
 Networking: Channel And Topology Limits
 Conclusion
 Introduction
 From the point of view of several researchers,
information processing is most opportunistic
area because of never ceasing demand of
more information carrying capacity, higher
speed, power efficiency.
 Electronic scaling laws have continued to

address interconnectivity and speed

bottlenecks in traditional processors for many
years.
 Then what happened? Optical Computing
 Introduction
 Many years of research have been devoted to all optical
implementation of analog or digital computation.
 Yet neither approach has been scalable to complex

computing circuits.
 Reasons are:

(1) Analog operations intensifies noise accumulation,

which limits the scaling and therefore the complexity
of the operations that can be performed on a signal.
(2) Digital processing is much more robust to noise but
the high scaling cost of digital photonic switches
makes this approach both prohibitively expensive and
impractical.
 Introduction
 Even if optical computing systems displayed a significant
advantage over their electronic counterparts, the Moore’s
law ensures that latter would soon be able to match and
then exceed their performance in just a couple years.
 But in recent years optical processing has been much

more convenient:
(1) Moore’s law is being stifled by physical limits of CMOS
architecture.
(2) Large-scale integration techniques in photonics are
just emerging.
(3) Possibility of hybrid analog-digital processing
presented by neuromorphic computing.
 Technology Comparison
J. Schemmel et.al. A wafer-scale
neuromorphic hardware system for
large-scale neural modeling. in
Proceedings of 2010 IEEE
International Symposium on Circuits
and Systems. IEEE, pp. 19471950
2010.

P. A. Merolla et.al. A million spiking-

neuron integrated circuit with a
scalable communication network and
interface. Science vol. 345(6197), pp.
668673 2014

B. Benjamin et.al. Neurogrid: A

mixed-analog-digital multichip
system for large-scale neural
simulations. Proceedings of the IEEE
vol. 102(5) pp. 699716 2014.
S. Furber et.al. The Spinnaker project.
Proceedings of the IEEE,vol. 102(5), pp.
652665 2014.
 Electronic Architecture
 To construct large scale neural
networks with electronic elements,
the topological constraint of digital
computers has to be overcome by
virtualization techniques.
 A team of researchers at IBM
implemented a different
architecture that mitigates Von
Neumann bottleneck by colocating
memory (synaptic connections)
next to small clusters or neurons
and combining that to an event-
driven communication network
between clusters. This
communication protocol is called
Address event Representation
(AER).
 Photonic Architecture
 In Photonic Architecture, instead of a spike being represented
abstractly by a sequence of bits optical spikes are directly embodied
by optical pulses, i.e., peaks in the power envelope of coherent light
typically of an infrared wavelength.
 Because these pulses have a precise wavelength, a single waveguide
can transport many optical spikes in parallel without interference.
This is known as wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM).
 The protocol through which two neurons communicate is dubbed
Broadcast-and-Weight protocol.
 All wavelength carried signals are transmitted in a broadcast
waveguide, and nodes attached to it can select and weight each
channel by tuning a weight bank filter.
 This broadcast waveguide is built in a loop (Broadcast Loop); then all
the nodes could be interconnected with all others.
 The most important feature of this protocol is the very high
interconnect density and low latency it can achieve, both of which
are outside the limits for digital or even analog electronics.
 Speed: Bandwidth & Latency
 Speed is perhaps the photonics platforms greatest strength. In
terms of signal bandwidth and latency, it can exceed that of any
other current hardware neural network implementation by several
orders of magnitude.
 The two section gain and SA laser has pulse width(Which decide
temporal resolution) of order of nanoseconds and refractory period(
which decide the processing speed) of order of picoseconds.
 While typical electrical interconnects are limited in their bandwidth
capacity and latency from RC charging. Complex interconnection
structures also require switching, multiplexing, and demultiplexing
circuitry, which can be an especially salient burden in parallelized
processing architectures. The use of shared buses in electronic
systems for signals, on the other hand, requires the ability to
handle very high bandwidths on each line.
Speed: Bandwidth and Latency
 Power Consumption: Energy and
Noise
 Photonic system can exhibit very high energy efficiency,
stemming largely from the analog nature of the
components and the unique properties of optical signals.
 The energy consumption of the system can theoretically
exhibit comparable performance to that of analog
electronic systems, but the system is capable of operating
at much higher bandwidths.
 There are two primary sources of energy dissipation in the
electrical domain to consider: capacitive switching and
static Joule heating.
 While in photonic systems pump power must exceed the
minimum lasing threshold, although a class of nanolasers
has been fabricated with a threshold on the order of 1 W.
Power Consumption: Energy and
Noise
Size: Device Density and Scalability
 Photonic elements cannot be much smaller than the
wavelength of the light traveling through them. This
diffraction limit puts a lower bound on the size of
individual photonic devices to microns, compared to the
nanometric-scale of state-ofthe-art electronic transistors.
 it makes far more sense to take advantage of the complex

dynamics that occur in optoelectronic devices to perform

computations in order to minimize the number of
components.
 Unlike electronics, there is no scalable digital platform that

can bootstrap the creation of complex neural models.

 Diffraction also limits the size of the network, since

waveguides cannot decrease beyond a hundred

nanometers in width.
Size: Device Density and Scalability
 Networking: Channel & Topology
Limits
 The first analog electronic neurons, which are
still capable of exhibiting very high power
efficiencies, lack a scalable routing scheme
that could be printed in a two dimensional
topology.
 Modern platforms combine spike-based

models with address event representation

(AER), which provides an efficient medium for
communication, with built-in switching and
routing protocols.
V. Betz et.al. Architecture and CAD for DeepSubmicron
FPGAs. New York, Philadelphia: Springer Science &
Business Media vol. 497 2012
 Networking: Channel and Topology
Limits
 In contrast, optical connections have an enormous
bandwidth capacity100s of 25 Gbps channels are
routinely multiplexed in back-haul optical networks,
for example.
 In that respect, tens or hundreds of high bandwidth

optical signals could simultaneously propagate in a

single waveguide.
 The use of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)

in the optical domain can resolve limitations that

plague electronics, and new advances in
microfabrication allow entire networks to be printed
onto a silicon photonic chip.
 Conclusion
 Neuromorphic photonic system garners many of its advantages
from its ability to multiplex high bandwidth signals in the optical
domain and perform summation during photodetection, the most
burdensome hardware limitation in neural network models.
 This is made possible through recent advantages in the

integration and scaling of modern PICs.

 Although the nonlinear processing portion of the pathway

utilizes electronic physics, the networking and multiply-

andaccumulate (MAC) operations take significant advantage of
the unique properties of light.
 In these respects, this technology platform is distinguished by its

processing advantages.
 Future scaling of the technology, particularly photonic crystals

and photonic-electronic hybrid integration will allow future

instantiations to operate faster, with larger channel capacities, or
closer to fundamental shot and thermal noise limits.
Thank You…