Low Loss Multistate Photonic Memories

High-computation speed is a need of an hour in today’s artificial intelligence era. An energy efficient and high-speed photonic memory device to transmit information in Photonic Integrate Circuits (PICs) will have great advantage in computing speeds. The photonic memories consists of an optical input, multiple configurations for reading and writing multi-bit words.

Researchers at GW have developed a non-volatile photonic memory device based on the phase-change material (PCM) with broadband transparencies used to store quantized information with negligible losses in the ‘0’ state. The invention provides a low losses multistate photonic memory device based on stoichiometric ally engineered PCM materials (Ge₂Sb₄Se₄Te₁ or Ge₂Sb₂Se₅),  which uses an electro-thermal interaction or an enhanced light matter interaction for storing data in a non-volatile fashion and using photons for reading it, yielding a limited surface area without the use of digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and phase tuners.

Figure 1. Low-loss multi-bit electrically driven photonic random-access memory (P-RAM) on-chip.

Advantages:

• High-speed data transfer
• Low-loss
• Highly energy-efficient

Applications:

• Neural networks calculations
• Optical computing
• Quantum networks