100x performance improvement: Xizhi released THE PHOTONIC COMPUTING PROCESSOR PACE

On December 19, the core research institute reported that a few days ago, a domestic company Xizhi Technology released a new generation of photonic computing processor PACE. Its latest high-performance photonic computing processor, PACE (Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine), integrates more than 10,000 photonic devices in a single photonic chip, runs a 1GHz system clock, and runs a specific recurrent neural network hundreds of times faster than current high-end GPUs.

Edited by the Institute of Core Research

PACE successfully verified the superiority of photonic computing, which is another major breakthrough of Xizhi Technology in the integrated circuit industry. Based on the basic principle of extremely low latency of optical execution matrix vector multiplication, PACE, the latest photonic computing processor released by Xizhi Technology, achieves low latency by repeating matrix multiplication and cleverly using tight loops composed of controlled noise, thus generating high-quality solutions to the Ising problem and max-cut/min-cut problem.

PACE contains a 64x64 optical matrix with a core consisting of an integrated silicon optical chip and a CMOS microelectronic chip stacked in a 3D package. For each optical matrix multiplication, the input vector value is first extracted from the on-chip memory, converted from a digital-to-analog converter to an analog value, and applied to the corresponding optical modulator by a micro-bump between the electronic chip and the photonic chip, forming an input light vector.

The input light vector propagates through the optical matrix, producing the output light vector and reaching a set of photodetector arrays, which converts the light intensity into a current signal. Electrical signals return to the electronic chip via microconvexes and to the digital domain via transimpedance amplifiers and analog-to-digital converters. Tests have shown that PACE can operate hundreds of times faster than today's high-end GPUs.

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