MDTransformer: A Hardware-Software Co-Design of Mode-Division Photonic Transformer Accelerator with Inverse-Designed Coherent Crossbar
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, ...
| Authors | Solomon Micheal Serunjogi, Rachmad Vidya Wicaksana Putra, Ayat Taha et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.AR |
| Published | 28 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 July 2026 |
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