The Shanghai Institute of Optical and Mechanical Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed an ultra-high parallel optical computing integrated chip “Meteor One”, breaking through the bottleneck of computing density – Passionategeekz

Passionategeekz On June 18, optical computing uses photons as carriers to realize information transmission, interaction and computing, with natural advantages of low power consumption, low latency, and high parallelism. It is an effective way to build a new quality computing power infrastructure in the post-Moore era, providing hardware acceleration for “computing power-intensive + energy consumption-sensitive” scenarios such as artificial intelligence, scientific computing, multimodal fusion perception, and ultra-large-scale data exchange.

The Shanghai Institute of Optical and Mechanical Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, issued a document today, announcing its latest research results in ultra-high parallel optical computing integrated chips.

According to reports, the team of Xie Peng, a researcher at the Aerospace Laser Technology and Systems Department of the Shanghai Institute of Optical Precision Mechanics, has made a breakthrough in solving the problem of “parallel processing of high-density information on optical chips”, and has developed an ultra-high parallel optical computing integrated chip – “Meteor One” (as shown in the figure below), realizing a photon computing prototype verification system with a parallelism of > 100.

Shanghai Institute of Optical and Mechanical Sciences said that scientists around the world have conducted in-depth exploration of the matrix scale and optical main frequency of optical computing chips, and the research progress has shown a trend of approaching the process limit and physical limit, and it is difficult to make further breakthroughs in order of magnitude. Therefore, effectively extending the parallelism of computing is the cutting-edge direction for improving optical computing performance and the only way for optical computing to move towards practicality.

In this regard, the research team has successfully developed a new on-chip parallel optical computing integrated chip system based on improving the parallelism of optical computing technology. The core optical chips of this system are all independently developed, including an independently developed integrated microcavity optical frequency comb (frequency interval ~ 50GHz, output spectral range > 80nm, and can support wavelength multiplexing calculation channels > 200), as a chip-level multi-wavelength light source subsystem; an independently developed large bandwidth, low latency, reconstructible optical computing chip (optical bandwidth > 40nm), as a high-performance parallel computing core; an independently developed high-precision, large-scale, scalable driver board, as an optical matrix driver subsystem (channel number > 256); based on this photonic integrated chip system, an on-chip optical information interaction and calculation prototype with a parallelism degree > 100 was verified for the first time; at 50GHz optical main frequency, the theoretical peak computing power of a single chip is > 2560TOPS, and the power consumption ratio is > 3.2TOPS / W.

Shanghai Institute of Optical and Mechanical Engineering stated that this research progress has opened up new ways to break through the computing density bottleneck of optical computing and improve optical computing performance, bringing possibilities to the development of superphoton computers with low power consumption, low latency, large computing power, and high speed.

On June 17, local time, relevant research results were published in “Light: News” in the form of a cover paper. The address of the paper attached by Passionategeekz is as follows:
https://doi.org/10.1186/s43593-025-00088-8

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