Towards a high-density photonic tensor core enabled by intensity-modulated microrings and photonic wire bonding

We propose a photonic processing unit for high-density analog computation using intensity-modulation-based microring modulators (IM-MRMs). The output signal at the fixed resonance wavelength is directly intensity modulated by changing the extinction ratio (ER) of the IM-MRM . Thanks to the intensity-modulated approach, the proposed photonic processing unit is less sensitive to the inter-channel crosstalk. Simulation results reveal that the proposed design offers a maximum of 17-fold increase in wavelength channel density compared to its wavelength-modulated counterpart. Therefore, a photonic tensor core of size 512 [Formula: see text] 512 can be realized by current foundry lines. A convolutional neural network (CNN) simulator with 6-bit precision is built for handwritten digit recognition task using the proposed modulator. Simulation results show an overall accuracy of 96.76%, when the wavelength channel spacing suffers a 3-dB power penalty. To experimentally validate the system, 1000 dot product operations are carried out with a 4-bit signed system on a co-packaged photonic chip, where optical and electrical I/Os are realized using photonic and electrical wire bonding techniques. Study of the measurement results show a mean squared error (MSE) of 3.09[Formula: see text]10[Formula: see text] for dot product calculations. The proposed IM-MRM, therefore, renders the crosstalk issue tractable and provides a solution for the development of large-scale optical information processing systems with multiple wavelengths.