Time-encoded analog photonic interposer links vision sensors to analog accelerators, 2.04x EDP gain

jwt0625 · x · 2026-09-06

An arXiv paper proposes a time-encoded analog photonic interposer for long-distance, high-fidelity analog signal transport between spatially separated chiplets. Instead of converting to digital, it encodes amplitudes into timing intervals via an analog-to-time converter, transmits over a wavelength-division-multiplexed photonic link, and reconstructs values without a high-precision ADC/DAC pipeline, embedding implicit 6-bit time-domain quantization with one wavelength per processing element.

Evaluated in a fully analog vision pipeline with an in-pixel computing sensor, it achieves 2.04x energy-delay product improvement over an 8-bit digital electrical baseline on the 560x560 Visual Wake Words dataset, holding 89.87%/86.15% accuracy with ResNet18/MobileNetV2 and staying within 2% of digital baselines on CIFAR-10 and ModelNet40.

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