General Lab Information

Electro-photonic Processor Architectures

Objectives

Integrated co-design of novel electro-photonic processing and networking architectures that leverage the benefits of performing large-scale computations and communication in optical-domain, while optimally partitioning tasks between electrical and optical domains.

Development of frameworks, tools and methodologies for enabling an automated, holistic, hardware-aware, top-down design approach.

Design partitioning and optimization approaches

  • Design partitioning between electrical and photonic domains driven by metrics such as latency, power consumption, communication bandwidth, throughput, complexity, reliability and cost, noise, interference
  • Tools to incorporate methods for efficient computation of linear operations
  • Optimizing data flow and buffering, mitigation of congestion
  • Efficient distribution of computational and communication loads
  • Usage of photonic interconnects to reduce latency and improve transmission bandwidth (for e.g. between processing and memory sub-systems)
  • Network slicing, dynamic adjustment of network partitioning, data-driven decision making

About El-Pho

The Brookhaven Lab team — supported by partners from national labs, academia, and industry — is studying and optimizing microelectronics circuits that can handle large quantities of data, such as those produced in complex multi-modal detectors expected to operate at increasing rates with near-sensor processing. El-Pho builds on key initiatives in the field of microelectronics research, such as electro-photonic detector units, on-the-fly data pre-processing, and electro-photonic processor architectures.

Partner Institutions

Industry Collaborator

Industry Liaison