Optical neural networks: The 3D connection

¹ Optics Laboratory, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
² FEMTO-ST/Optics Department, UMR CNRS 6174, Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté, 25030 Besançon Cedex, France

^* e-mail : daniel.brunner@femto-st.fr

Résumé

We motivate a canonical strategy for integrating photonic neural networks (NN) by leveraging 3D printing. Our belief is that a NN’s parallel and dense connectivity is not scalable without 3D integration. 3D additive fabrication complemented with photonic signal transduction can dramatically augment the current capabilities of 2D CMOS and integrated photonics. Here we review some of our recent advances made towards such an architecture.