Parallel photonic acceleration processor for matrix–matrix multiplication

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a highly parallel photonic acceleration processor based on a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) system and a non-coherent Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) array for matrix–matrix multiplication. The dimensional expansion is achieved by WDM devices, which play a crucial role in realizing matrix–matrix multiplication together with the broadband characteristics of an MZI. We implemented a 2 × 2 arbitrary nonnegative valued matrix using a reconfigurable 8 × 8 MZI array structure. Through experimentation, we verified that this structure could achieve 90.5% inference accuracy in a classification task for the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) handwritten dataset. This provides a new effective solution for large-scale integrated optical computing systems based on convolution acceleration processors.