Photonic AI turns light-pulse overlap into computation: 5.12 TOPS per microring at 128 Gbaud
bravo_abad · x · 2026-09-25
A new optical computing paper flips a usual engineering problem into a feature: instead of correcting inter-pulse overlap in fast optical signals, it uses the blur to compute.
- Liu and coauthors use microring devices that naturally mix information from several neighboring time steps at high speed
- The system is trained to treat this mixing as a convolution — one microring goes from acting as a single weight to processing multiple neighboring values at once
- At 128 Gbaud, a single ring reaches 5.12 trillion operations per second, about 160× the throughput of conventional approaches
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