English

Homodyne Photonic Tensor Processor exceeds 1,000-TOPS

Emerging Technologies 2026-04-22 v2

Abstract

High-performance computing underpins modern artificial intelligence (AI), enabling foundation models, real-time inference and perception in autonomous systems, and data-intensive scientific simulations. Recent advances in quantization techniques utilizing low-precision computation without degrading model accuracy, create new opportunities for analog photonic computing characterized by ultra-high clock rates and low energy consumption. Here we propose and demonstrate a coherent homodyne integrated circuit capable of general matrix multiplication (GEMM) with aggregate throughput that exceeds 1,000 TOPS (tera-operations per second), enabled by massive on-chip optical fanout and parallelism. By leveraging time multiplexing, the required modulator count is reduced from O(N2N^2) to O(N), allowing dense integration of record-scale 256 ×\times 256 homodyne units (each <0.0064 mm2mm^2) within a single reticle. We employ wafer-scale fabricated 64 thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) transmitters (each over 40-GHz bandwidth with propagation loss of 0.2 dB/cm) to encode data and chip-to-chip coupled to Si/SiN computing circuits (64 channels). Our system achieves up to 7-bit computational accuracy across 8 ×\times 8 parallel channels at record computing clockrate 120 Gbaud/s, and 6-bit statistical accuracy across 256 ×\times 100 channels at 20-128 Gbaud/s, representing a total throughput of 1,000-6,000 TOPS. Massive parallelism amortizes the optoelectronic (OE) conversion to allow 330-TOPS/W efficiency using foundry-available packaging technology. The system throughput is benchmarked with Qwen2.5-0.5 billion parameter models that generate accurate tokens. High throughput and energy efficiency establish a near-term pathway toward light-based accelerators for large-scale training and low-latency inference from datacenters to edges, accelerating new models toward artificial general intelligence.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.18496,
  title  = {Homodyne Photonic Tensor Processor exceeds 1,000-TOPS},
  author = {Lian Zhou and Kaiwen Xue and Yun-Jhu Lee and Chun-Ho Lee and Yuan Li and Kiwon Kwon and Weipeng Zhang and Songlin Zhao and Jason Moraes and Niranjan Bhatia and Ryan Hamerly and Mengjie Yu and Zaijun Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.18496},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:18:44.722Z