PIXEL: Photonic Neural Network Accelerator

Machine learning (ML) architectures such as Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved unprecedented accuracy on modern applications such as image classification and speech recognition. With power dissipation becoming a major concern in ML architectures, computer architects have focused on designing both energy-efficient hardware platforms as well as optimizing ML algorithms. To dramatically reduce power consumption and increase parallelism in neural network accelerators, disruptive technology such as silicon photonics has been proposed which can improve the performance-per-Watt when compared to electrical implementation. In this paper, we propose PIXEL - Photonic Neural Network Accelerator that efficiently implements the fundamental operation in neural computation, namely the multiply and accumulate (MAC) functionality using photonic components such as microring resonators (MRRs) and Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI). We design two versions of PIXEL - a hybrid version that multiplies optically and accumulates electrically and a fully optical version that multiplies and accumulates optically. We perform a detailed power, area and timing analysis of the different versions of photonic and electronic accelerators for different convolution neural networks (AlexNet, VGG16, and others). Our results indicate a significant improvement in the energy-delay product for both PIXEL designs over traditional electrical designs (48.4% for OE and 73.9% for OO) while minimizing latency, at the cost of increased area over electrical designs.