MDTransformer: A Hardware-Software Co-Design of Mode-Division Photonic Transformer Accelerator with Inverse-Designed Coherent Crossbar

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2607.26016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recently, photonic transformer accelerators (PTAs) have successfully achieved significant speedup and energy efficiency improvements over electronic accelerators for expediting Transformer inference. However, state-of-the-art rely on expensive multi-wavelength light generation and large dot-product units due to active phase-shifter components, thus making their approach inefficient and impractical. To address this, we propose MDTransformer, a novel hardware-software co-design of PTA based on mode-division optical dataflow and operations. Specifically, MDTransformer performs complex matrix operations using spatial-mode interference, that leverages the inverse-designed multi-mode couplers, crossings, and Mach-Zehnder IQ modulators into a comp