Foundry fabricated compact slow-light Mach-Zehnder modulator and photodetector for on-chip analog photonic computing

This work presents a scaling pathway of on-chip analog photonic computing using foundry-fabricated silicon electro-optic (EO) slow-light Mach-Zehnder modulators (SL-MZMs) and compact Ge photodetectors (PDs) to construct a computing unit. Two SL-MZMs with phase shifter (PS) lengths of 500 µm and 150 µm are studied in this work. The bit resolution, nonlinearity, clock frequency, and power consumption of the photonic computing link, including an RF amplifier, on-chip SL-MZM, and a PD, are thoroughly investigated. The computing link using the SL-MZM with 500 µm has demonstrated a low normalized mean square error (NMSE) of 0.0305 at 8-bit resolution under 3.2 GHz clock frequency. Under the setting of 6-bit resolution at a clock frequency of 800 MHz, high computing accuracy was achieved with a measured NMSE of 0.0018 using the SL-MZM with 150 µm PS length. Using the Google Speed Commands dataset to run a voice keyword spotting task, we determine that 6-bit resolution operating at 3.2 GHz achieves the optimal power-accuracy trade-off. We show a 20× improvement in energy efficiency and a 3.35× improvement in area efficiency compared to NVIDIA V100 GPU [“Volta: Performance and programmability,” IEEE Micro 38(2), 42 (2018) ]. These results show that our compact SL-MZMs and PDs promise to scale up photonic computing for practical machine-learning applications.