MIT News  August 22, 2023 Optical neural networks (ONNs) have recently emerged to process deep neural networks (DNN) tasks with high clock rates, parallelism, and low-loss data transmission. However, existing challenges for ONNs are high energy consumption due to their low electro-optic conversion efficiency, low compute density due to large device footprints and channel crosstalk, and long latency due to the lack of inline nonlinearity. An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, UCLA, industry, Germany) experimentally demonstrated a spatial-temporal-multiplexed ONN system that simultaneously overcomes all these challenges. They exploited neuron encoding with volume-manufactured micrometre-scale vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) arrays […]