Computer hardware

Von Neumann architecture

Engineering

Efficient energy use

Operating system

Computer science

Digital signal processing

Nanophotonics

Signal processing

Physics

Computer architecture

Optics

Electronic engineering

Computer engineering

Artificial intelligence

Deep learning

Artificial neural network

Optical computing

Electrical engineering

Nature Photonics

Artificial Neural Networks are computational network models inspired by signal processing in the brain. These models have dramatically improved the performance of many learning tasks, including speech and object recognition. However, today's computing hardware is inefficient at implementing neural networks, in large part because much of it was designed for von Neumann computing schemes. Significant effort has been made to develop electronic architectures tuned to implement artificial neural networks that improve upon both computational speed and energy efficiency. Here, we propose a new architecture for a fully-optical neural network that, using unique advantages of optics, promises a computational speed enhancement of at least two orders of magnitude over the state-of-the-art and three orders of magnitude in power efficiency for conventional learning tasks. We experimentally demonstrate essential parts of our architecture using a programmable nanophotonic processor.

Deep learning with coherent nanophotonic circuits