Best-of-both-worlds computing in 3D-electronic-photonic-integrated-circuits (3D EPICs)

Photonic computing has recently attracted strong renewed interest through experimental demonstrations in integrated photonic circuits with remarkable energy-efficiency and throughput. However, photonics alone cannot achieve general-purpose data-centric computing with agility due to fundamental limitations of bosons. We discuss nanoscale 3D-electronic-photonic-integrated-circuits (3D EPICs) and their applications in future computing. The talk will be in two parts. (a) 3D EPIC neuromorphic computing systems consisting of attojoule nanoscale optoelectronic neurons and photonic synaptic neural networks to pursue scalable brain-derived computing with self-learning capability, and (b) 3D EPIC fine-grain accelerators and memory units interconnected by all-to-all photonic networks for scalable graph analytic workloads. We will further explore heterogeneous reconfigurable computing systems enabled by photonic and electronic reconfiguration in clusters with heterogeneous 3D EPICs.