Optical and Photonic Computing for Deep Learning Acceleration: Silicon Photonics, Mach-Zehnder Meshes, and Wavelength-Division Multiplexing
Abstract—The relentless exponential scaling of foundation models and transformer architectures has pushed conventional silicon complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) digital accelerators (GPUs, TPUs) toward fundamental thermodynamic and interconnect boundaries. Joule heating, resistance-capacitance (RC) interco...