Ziang Yin
Publications
Harnessing Photonics for Machine Intelligence
The exponential growth of machine-intelligence workloads is colliding with the power, memory, and interconnect limits of the post-Moore era, motivating compute substrates that scale beyond transistor density alone. Integrated photonics is emerging as a candidate for artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration by exploiting optical bandwidth and parallelism to reshape data movement and computation. This review reframes photonic computing from a circuits-and-systems perspective, moving beyond building-block progress toward cross-layer system analysis and full-stack design automation. We synthesize recent advances through a bottleneck-driven taxonomy that delineates the operating regimes and scaling trends where photonics can deliver end-to-end sustained benefits. A central theme is cross-layer co-design and workload-adaptive programmability to sustain high efficiency and versatility across evolving application domains at scale. We further argue that Electronic-Photonic Design Automation (EPDA) will be pivotal, enabling closed-loop co-optimization across simulation, inverse design, system modeling, and physical implementation. By charting a roadmap from laboratory prototypes to scalable, reproducible electronic-photonic ecosystems, this review aims to guide the CAS community toward an automated, system-centric era of photonic machine intelligence.
ReDON: Recurrent Diffractive Optical Neural Processor with Reconfigurable Self-Modulated Nonlinearity
Diffractive optical neural networks (DONNs) have demonstrated unparalleled energy efficiency and parallelism by processing information directly in the optical domain. However, their computational expressivity is constrained by static, passive diffractive phase masks that lack efficient nonlinear responses and reprogrammability. To address these limitations, we introduce the Recurrent Diffractive Optical Neural Processor (ReDON), a novel architecture featuring reconfigurable, recurrent self-modulated nonlinearity. This mechanism enables dynamic, input-dependent optical transmission through in-situ electro-optic self-modulation, providing a highly efficient and reprogrammable approach to optical computation. Inspired by the gated linear unit (GLU) used in large language models, ReDON senses a fraction of the propagating optical field and modulates its phase or intensity via a lightweight parametric function, enabling effective nonlinearity with minimal inference overhead. As a non-von Neumann architecture in which the primary weighting elements (metasurfaces) remain fixed, ReDON substantially extends the nonlinear representational capacity and task adaptability of conventional DONNs through recurrent optical hardware reuse and dynamically tunable nonlinearity. We systematically investigate various self-modulation configurations to characterize the trade-offs between hardware efficiency and computational expressivity. On image recognition and segmentation benchmarks, ReDON improves test accuracy and mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) by up to 20% compared with prior DONNs employing either optical or digital nonlinearities at comparable model complexity and negligible additional power consumption. This work establishes a new paradigm for reconfigurable nonlinear optical computing, uniting recurrence and self-modulation within non-von Neumann analog processors.