Lithium-niobate photonic integrated circuits for GHz, sub-picojoule/bit optical image processing

Optical image processing, which capitalizes on the distinctive characteristics of light, facilitates the manipulation of visual data in real-time and at a high speed. This technology is instrumental in performing tasks such as enhancing edges, recognizing patterns, and extracting features, all of which are crucial in fields like medical imaging, surveillance, and industrial automation. In this study, we present the successful demonstration of a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) made of Lithium niobate on insulator, enabling matrix-vector multiplications for image classification. By surpassing an electrical bandwidth of 15 GHz, our experiment showcases the PIC's ability live edge detection and video streaming. Remarkably, its energy efficiency surpasses the limit imposed by electronic systems for each operation by consuming < 10 fJ/bit.