A new technical paper titled **“A Case Study on the Performance Metrics of Integrated Photonic Computing”** has been published by researchers from IBM Research Europe, the University of Heidelberg, and the University of Münster.
**Abstract**
Photonic processors utilize optical signals for computation, taking advantage of the high bandwidth and low loss characteristics of optical links. Although numerous approaches have been proposed, including in-memory photonic circuits, most research has concentrated on the physical design of photonic components rather than the full architectural integration with electronic peripheral circuitry.
In this work, the authors present a microarchitecture-level study that estimates the compute efficiency and density of three prominent photonic computing architectures. Their evaluation accounts for both the photonic circuits and the essential peripheral electronics required for optoelectronic and analog-to-digital conversions.
Furthermore, the paper demonstrates a heterogeneous photonic-electronic in-memory processing approach targeted at low-latency neural network inference. These results offer deeper insight into the key design aspects of photonic computing.
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**Publication Details**
– **Title:** A Case Study on the Performance Metrics of Integrated Photonic Computing
– **Authors:** Frank Brückerhoff-Plückelmann, Jelle Dijkstra, Julian Büchel, Bottyan Batkai, Falk Ebert, Luis Mickeler, Urs Egger, Abu Sebastian, Wolfram Pernice, Ghazi Sarwat Syed
– **Published:** October 2025
– **Source:** arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.00186 (2025)
– **Access the paper [here](https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00186)**
This study represents an important step toward understanding and optimizing integrated photonic computing architectures, potentially paving the way for more efficient and dense computational systems in the future.
https://semiengineering.com/study-of-compute-efficiency-and-density-of-3-photonic-computing-architectures-ibm-et-al/
