Error Correction for Programmable Photonics

Programmable photonic circuits of reconfigurable interferometers can be used to implement arbitrary operations on optical modes, providing a flexible platform for accelerating tasks in quantum simulation, signal processing, and artificial intelligence. A major obstacle to scaling up these systems is static fabrication error, where small component errors within each device accrue to produce significant errors within the circuit computation. Mitigating errors usually involves numerical optimization dependent on real-time feedback from the circuit, which can greatly limit the scalability of the hardware. Here, we present a resource-efficient, deterministic approach to correcting circuit errors by locally correcting hardware errors within individual optical gates. We apply our approach to simulations of large-scale optical neural networks and infinite impulse response filters implemented in programmable photonics, finding that they remain resilient to component error well beyond modern day process tolerances.

Researchers

Dirk R Englund / Ryan Hamerly / Saumil Bandyopadhyay

Departments: Dept of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Research Laboratory of Electronics
Technology Areas: Computer Science: Networking & Signals / Electronics & Photonics: Photonics

  • error correction for programmable photonics
    United States of America | Published application

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