Paper

Towards Area-Efficient Optical Neural Networks: An FFT-based Architecture

Publication Date:
Publication Date
March 2020
Author(s)
J. Gu, Z. Zhao, C. Feng, M. Liu, R. T. Chen and D. Z. Pan

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Abstract

As a promising neuromorphic framework, the optical neural network (ONN) demonstrates ultra-high inference speed with low energy consumption. However, the previous ONN architectures have high area overhead which limits their practicality. In this paper, we propose an area-efficient ONN architecture based on structured neural networks, leveraging optical fast Fourier transform for efficient computation. A two-phase software training flow with structured pruning is proposed to further reduce the optical component utilization. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed architecture can achieve 2.2~3.7× area cost improvement compared with the previous singular value decomposition-based architecture with comparable inference accuracy.