LoCI: An Analysis of the Impact of Optical Loss and Crosstalk Noise in Integrated Silicon-Photonic Neural Networks

Compared to electronic accelerators, integrated silicon-photonic neural networks (SP-NNs) promise higher speed and energy efficiency for emerging artificial-intelligence applications. However, a hitherto overlooked problem in SP-NNs is that the underlying silicon photonic devices suffer from intrinsic optical loss and crosstalk noise, the impact of which accumulates as the network scales up. Leveraging precise device-level models, this paper presents the first comprehensive and systematic optical loss and crosstalk modeling framework for SP-NNs. For an SP-NN case study with two hidden layers and 1380 tunable parameters, we show a catastrophic 84% drop in inferencing accuracy due to optical loss and crosstalk noise.