Photonic edge computing based on directly modulated laser array

Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models are becoming increasingly powerful. However, their immense parameter size makes it challenging to deploy these models on small-scale devices such as smartphones, sensors, and other edge terminals. To address this issue, we propose a solution using an array of Directly Modulated Lasers (DML) as cloud-based transmitters. These transmitters efficiently deliver the required weight bank to application terminals. In our implementation, we achieved edge computing capabilities over 10 km transmission distance by utilizing an 8-wavelength DML array under 10 Gb/s per wavelength. This setup delivered a dot-product precision of 4.3 bits, along with classification accuracies: 97 % for the MNIST dataset and 92.4 % for the FashionMNIST dataset. This approach demonstrates the feasibility of leveraging optical communication technologies to overcome deployment limitations of large AI models on resource-constrained devices.