Automated logic synthesis for electro-optic computing in integrated photonics

As a tremendous amount of data is being created exponentially day by day, integrated optical computing starts to attract lots of attention recently due to the bottleneck in the continuation of Moore’s law. With the rapid development of micro/nano-scale optical devices, integrated photonics has shown its potential to satisfy the demand of computation with an ultracompact size, ultrafast speed, and ultralow power consumption. As one of the paradigms in optical computing, the electro-optic logic that combines the merits of photonics and electronics has made considerable progress in various fundamental logic gates. It therefore becomes very critical to develop an automated design method to synthesize these logic devices for large-scale optical computing circuits. In this paper, we propose a new automated logic synthesis algorithm based on And-Inverter Graphs (AIGs) for electro-optic computing. A comprehensive component library of electro-optic logic is summarized with several new proposed logic gates. As an example, a large-scale ripple-carry full adder which serves as the core part of the arithmetic logical unit (ALU) is presented. In the design, all the electrical signals could be applied simultaneously at every clock cycle and then the light could process the signals through every bit at the speed of light without any delay accumulated. High-speed experiment demonstrations are carried out, which show its potential in future high-speed and low-power-consumption optical computing.