English

Fully reconfigurable coherent optical vector-matrix multiplication

Optics 2020-11-23 v1 Applied Physics

Abstract

Optics is a promising platform in which to help realise the next generation of fast, parallel and energy-efficient computation. We demonstrate a reconfigurable free-space optical multiplier that is capable of over 3000 computations in parallel, using spatial light modulators with a pixel resolution of only 340x340. This enables vector-matrix multiplication and parallel vector-vector multiplication with vector size of up to 56. Our design is the first to simultaneously support optical implementation of reconfigurable, large-size and real-valued linear algebraic operations. Such an optical multiplier can serve as a building block of special-purpose optical processors such as optical neural networks and optical Ising machines.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2009.12095,
  title  = {Fully reconfigurable coherent optical vector-matrix multiplication},
  author = {James Spall and Xianxin Guo and Thomas D. Barrett and A. I. Lvovsky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.12095},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

4 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T18:47:20.764Z