PHANES: ReRAM-based photonic accelerator for deep neural networks

Resistive random access memory (ReRAM) has demonstrated great promises of in-situ matrix-vector multiplications to accelerate deep neural networks. However, subject to the intrinsic properties of analog processing, most of the proposed ReRAM-based accelerators require excessive costly ADC/DAC to avoid distortion of electronic analog signals during inter-tile transmission. Moreover, due to bit-shifting before addition, prior works require longer cycles to serially calculate partial sum compared to multiplications, which dramatically restricts the throughput and is more likely to stall the pipeline between layers of deep neural networks.