Chip design drastically reduces energy needed to compute with light

Recently, MIT researchers have started developing photonic accelerators for optical neural networks. “If your photonic accelerator can’t process more than 100 neurons per layer, then it makes it difficult to implement large neural networks into that architecture.” Pulses of light encoded with information about the input and output neurons for each neural network layer — which are needed to train the network — flow through a single channel.

Source: news.mit.edu