A Comparative Analysis of Microrings Based Incoherent Photonic GEMM Accelerators

Sairam Sri Vatsavai, Venkata Sai Praneeth Karempudi, Oluwaseun Adewunmi Alo, Ishan Thakkar

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Several analog photonic architectures based on microring resonators (MRRs) have been proposed to accelerate general matrix-matrix multiplications (GEMMs) that compose deep neural networks with exceptional throughput and energy efficiency. To implement GEMM functions, these MRR-based architectures, in general, manipulate optical signals in five different ways: (i) Splitting (copying) of multiple optical signals to achieve a certain fan-out, (ii) Aggregation (multiplexing) of multiple optical signals to achieve a certain fan-in, (iii) Modulation of optical signals to imprint input values onto analog signal amplitude, (iv) Weighting of modulated optical signals to achieve analog input-weight multiplication, (v) Summation of optical signals. Prior accelerators undertake the first four ways of signal manipulation in an arbitrary order ignoring the possible impact of the order of these manipulations on their performance. In this paper, we conduct a detailed analysis of accelerator organizations with three different orders of these manipulations: (1) Modulation-Aggregation-Splitting-Weighting (MASW), (2) Aggregation-Splitting-Modulation-Weighting (ASMW), and (3) Splitting-Modulation-Weighting-Aggregation (SMWA). We show that these organizations affect the crosstalk noise and optical signal losses in different magnitudes, which renders these organizations with different levels of processing parallelism at the circuit level, and different magnitudes of throughput and energy-area efficiency at the system level. Our evaluation results for four CNN models show that the SMWA organization achieves up to 4.4 ×, 5 × , and 5.2 × better throughput, energy efficiency, and area efficiency, respectively, compared to the ASMW and MASW organizations on average.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design, ISQED 2024
ISBN (Electronic)9798350309270
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Event25th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design, ISQED 2024 - Hybrid, San Francisco, United States
Duration: Apr 3 2024Apr 5 2024

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design, ISQED
ISSN (Print)1948-3287
ISSN (Electronic)1948-3295

Conference

Conference25th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design, ISQED 2024
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityHybrid, San Francisco
Period4/3/244/5/24

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 IEEE.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

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