Mixed Precision Photonic Computing with 3D Electronic-Photonic Integrated Circuits
Abstract
We propose advancing photonic in-memory computing through three-dimensional photonic-electronic integrated circuits using phase-change materials (PCM) and AlGaAs-CMOS technology. These circuits offer high precision (greater than 12 bits), scalability (greater than 1024 by 1024), and massive parallelism (greater than 1 million operations) across the wavelength, spatial, and temporal domains at ultra-low power (less than 1 watt per PetaOPS). Monolithically integrated hybrid PCM-AlGaAs memory resonators handle coarse-precision iterations (greater than 5-bit most significant bit precision) through reversible PCM phase transitions. Electro-optic memristive tuning enables fine-precision updates (greater than 8-bit least significant bit precision), resulting in over 12-bit precision for in-memory computing. The use of low-loss PCM (less than 0.01 dB per cm) and electro-optical tuning yields memristive optical resonators with high Q-factors (greater than 1 million), low insertion loss, and low tuning power. A W by W photonic tensor core composed of PCM-AlGaAs memresonators performs general matrix multiplication (GEMM) across W wavelengths from optical frequency combs, with minimal crosstalk and loss. Hierarchical scaling in the wavelength domain (K) and spatial domain (L) enables this system to address high-dimensional (N) scientific partial differential equation (PDE) problems in a single constant-time operation, compared to the conventional quadratic-time (N squared) computational complexity.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.03063,
title = {Mixed Precision Photonic Computing with 3D Electronic-Photonic Integrated Circuits},
author = {Georgios Charalampous and Rui Chen and Mehmet Berkay On and Aslan Nasirov and Chun-Yi Cheng and Mahmoud AbdelGhany and Arka Majumdar and Ji Wang and Jennifer A. Black and Rajkumar Chinnakonda Kubendran and Caglar Oskay and Zhaojun Bai and Sam Palermo and Scott B. Papp and S. J. Ben Yoo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.03063},
year = {2025}
}