Abstract
Photonic neural accelerators offer ultra-low latency linear algebra, yet their usable numerical precision, sustainable throughput, and application accuracy remain tightly bounded by surrounding electro-optical interfaces and physical non-idealities. Pre-fabrication design-space exploration (DSE) requires a cross-layer electronic design automation (EDA) framework capable of evaluating disparate optical topologies under identical neural workloads and physical assumptions. We present \textbf{PISim}, a unified Photonic Inference Simulator that couples pretrained deep neural network execution with physics-based models of six accelerator architecture families, six electro-optic modulator technologies, four optical source organizations, and direct or coherent readout schemes. PISim embeds stage-resolved impairment operators---covering control and analog-to-digital quantization, finite extinction ratio, shot noise, correlated relative-intensity noise (RIN), thermal drift, propagation loss, and channel crosstalk---alongside an analytical cycle-level interface timing model to expose electronic-optical bottlenecks. Using simulated MNIST multilayer perceptron (MLP) benchmarks, we demonstrate how PISim identifies optimal precision operating points under multi-impairment stress (peaking at 6 bits for Mach--Zehnder and microring modulators), quantifies a 52.5 percentage-point accuracy gap between VCSEL-array and parallel-fanout laser architectures arising, under the modeled conditions, from power partitioning and correlated source noise, and models interface-limited throughput scaling across emitter-array widths from 32 to 128 channels. This comprehensive framework establishes an extensible, reproducible foundation for accuracy-constrained Pareto optimization prior to photonic tape-out.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.16522
