Photonic Binary Convolutional Neural Network Based on Microring Resonator Array
Ruiting Wang, Pengfei Wang, Chen Lyu, Guangzhen Luo, Jianbin Ma, Xuliang Zhou, Yejin Zhang, Jiaoqing Pan · IEEE Photonics Technology Letters · 2023
We propose the photonic architecture based on microring resonator (MRR) arrays for binary convolutional neural networks (BCNNs) accelerated computing. The MRR crossbar unit is used for computing weight {−1, 1} and the single MRR is for input {0, 1}. The computing parallelism is improved through wavelength division multiplexing. The photonic BCNN achieves 97.29% classification accuracy on the MNIST test set which is only 1.94% lower than the accuracy of the 32-bit neural network, and saves$32\times $at memory usage. We analyze effects of input and weight encoding errors on the photonic BCNN. When the input or weight error rate is less than 0.01%, the test accuracy remains unchanged. We evaluate the performance of the photonic BCNN architecture considering optical loss, inter-channel crosstalk, operation frequency and device power consumption. The energy efficiency of the designed photonic BCNN architecture is 1.72 pJ/MAC, which is$4.80\times $and$61.32\times $better than the 8-bit and 16-bit architecture respectively. The photonic BCNN is promising to be used for edge computing.