Abstract-

The massive data deluge from mobile, IoT, and edge devices, together with powerful innovations in data science and hardware processing, have established artificial intelligence (AI) as the cornerstone of modern medical, automotive, industrial automation, and consumer electronics domains. Domain-specific AI accelerators now dominate CPUs and GPUs for energy-efficient AI and machine learning processing. However, the evolution of these electronic accelerators is facing fundamental limits due to the slowdown of Moore’s law and the reliance on metal wires, which severely bottleneck computational performance today. In this talk, I will present my vision of how silicon photonics can drive an entirely new class of light-driven AI hardware accelerators that can provide orders of magnitude energy improvements over today’s accelerators. I will discuss the evolution of silicon photonics, from integrated optics to photonic devices that can now be fabricated with low-cost CMOS-compatible manufacturing techniques. I will cover new directions in the design of robust and secure photonic substrates for communication, computation, and storage to support emerging AI applications based on
LLMs, graph processing, and generative modeling. I will share experiences from my journey over the past two decades towards realizing viable silicon photonic architectures. I will end the talk with a discussion of the open challenges to achieve unparalleled energy-efficiency and performance gains in future computing platforms with silicon photonics.

Sudeep Pasricha

 Sudeep Pasricha is a Aram and Helga Budak Endowed Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Department of Computer Science, and the Department of Systems Engineering at Colorado State University. He is currently Director of the Embedded, High Performance, and Intelligent Computing (EPIC) Laboratory and the Chair of Computer Engineering. He is a former University Distinguished Monfort Professor and College of Engineering Rockwell-Anderson Endowed Professor.

Coming up In May-