arXiv AI

MDTransformer: A Hardware-Software Co-Design of Mode-Division Photonic Transformer Accelerator with Inverse-Designed Coherent Crossbar

arXiv:2607. 26016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recently, photonic transformer accelerators (PTAs) have successfully achieved significant speedup and energy efficiency improvements over electronic accelerators for expediting Transformer inference.

arXiv AI
Jun 8

DxPTA: An Architecture Design Space Exploration with Optical Dataflow-guided Strategy for HW/SW Co-Design of Photonic Transformer Accelerators

arXiv:2606. 06515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based networks have emerged as prominent AI models with state-of-the-art performance, which potentially pave the way toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).

By Rachmad Vidya Wicaksana Putra, Solomon Micheal Serunjogi, Mahmoud Rasras, Muhammad Shafique
arXiv AI
2d ago

ShatterQuant: Breaking Uniform Precision with Block-Wise Mixed-Precision on a Systolic Transformer Hardware Accelerator

ShatterQuant is a hardware-software co-designed framework that enables mixed-precision quantization within individual tensors by assigning different bit-widths to blocks of a weight projection. It couples precision granularity with processing element configuration, allowing each precision to determine an effective block height. The framework includes a hardware-aware post-training method based on block-level standard deviation and weight sensitivity, a ShatterQuant Transformer Accelerator supporting 1/2/4/8-bit weight precision, precision-dependent PE configuration, block rescaling, and integrated softmax and piecewise-linear nonlinearities, and an evaluation showing 1.5 TOPS, 760 GOPS/$mm^2$ area efficiency, and 2.8 TOPS/W energy efficiency on a TSMC 16nm PDK implementation.

By Mikolaj Walczak, Edward Humes, Chao Fang, Marian Verhelst, Tinoosh Mohsenin
arXiv AI
Jul 23

Opto-ViT-v2: Noise-Resilient On-Chip Fine-Tuning for Photonic Near-Sensor Vision Transformer Accelerators

arXiv:2607. 19421v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Silicon-photonic (SiPh) accelerators have emerged as a promising platform for Vision Transformer (ViT) inference by performing matrix multiplications on microring-resonator (MRR) banks with high throughput and energy efficiency.

By Xuming Chen, Deniz Najafi, Mehrdad Morsali, Chengwei Zhou, Zahra Ghanaatianjobzari, Mahdi Nikdast, Shaahin Angizi, Gourav Datta
arXiv AI
Aug 24

VortexChat: An agentic framework for autonomous multi-objective integrated photonic design

VortexChat is an agentic framework that autonomously performs end-to-end inverse design of integrated photonic devices from natural language specifications. It combines a large language model decision agent with topology generation, gradient-based refinement, and full-wave electromagnetic simulation in a closed-loop architecture, enabling iterative decomposition of design objectives and minimal human intervention. The system successfully generated devices meeting the Vortex100 Benchmark metrics and fabricated a broadband terahertz perfect vortex beam multiplexer that matched simulation predictions.

By Faqian Chong, Yulun Wu, Shilong Li, Andrew Forbes, Hongsheng Chen, Song Han
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 26

Transformer Accelerator (TFA): A Macro-Op INT8 Hardware Chip for Transformer Inference and Machine Translation

The Transformer Accelerator (TFA) is a synthesizable, parameterizable INT8 memory‑to‑memory engine designed for transformer inference and machine translation. It features a one‑time‑multiplexed datapath that handles prompt processing and autoregressive generation, and implements key operations such as matrix multiplication, softmax, RMSNorm, and elementwise functions through eight 512‑bit macro‑op descriptors. In extensive verification, TFA achieved zero mismatches across 25 tests and 34 constrained‑random runs, matched floating‑point references on multiple translation tasks, and delivered a 20× speedup over a 22‑thread CPU while projecting significant energy reductions in larger designs.

By Shashank
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

Arbitrary control over multimode wave propagation for machine learning

arXiv:2402. 17750v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlled multimode wave propagation can enable more space-efficient photonic processors than architectures based on discrete components connected by single-mode waveguides.

By Tatsuhiro Onodera, Martin M. Stein, Benjamin A. Ash, Mandar M. Sohoni, Melissa Bosch, Ryotatsu Yanagimoto, Marc Jankowski, Timothy P. McKenna, Tianyu Wang, Gennady Shvets, Maxim R. Shcherbakov, Logan G. Wright, Peter L. McMahon
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 3

Will Accurate Fields Mislead Photonic Design? FromGlobal Accuracy to Port Readout

arXiv:2606. 03038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural field surrogates can accelerate photonic design loops, but a surrogate that looks accurate in global field error can still mis-rank candidate devices when the final decision depends on localized output-port readouts.

By Yitian Zhang, Yonghong chen, Youming Chen, Yiyang Li, Xing Zhe, Renhe Lu, Shaolin Liao, Yuzhe Ma, Zhong Guan