LightML: A Photonic Accelerator for Efficient General Purpose Machine Learning
Liang Liu, Sadra Rahimi Kari, Xin Xin, Nathan Youngblood, Youtao Zhang, Jun Yang · 2025
The rapid integration of AI technologies into everyday life across sectors such as healthcare, autonomous driving, and smart home applications requires extensive computational resources, placing strain on server infrastructure and incurring significant costs.We present LightML, the first system-level photonic crossbar design, optimized for high-performance machine learning applications.This work provides the first complete memory and buffer architecture carefully designed to support the high-speed photonic crossbar, achieving over 80% utilization.LightML also introduces solutions for key ML functions, including large-scale matrix multiplication (MMM), element-wise operations, non-linear functions, and convolutional layers.Delivering 325 TOP/s at only 3 watts, LightML offers significant improvements in speed and power efficiency, making it ideal for both edge devices and dense data center workloads.