Principles of Neuromorphic Photonics

In an age overrun with information, the ability to process reams of data has become crucial. The demand for data will continue to grow as smart gadgets multiply and become increasingly integrated into our daily lives. Next-generation industries in artificial intelligence services and high-performance computing are so far supported by microelectronic platforms. These data-intensive enterprises rely on continual improvements in hardware. Their prospects are running up against a stark reality: conventional one-size-fits-all solutions offered by digital electronics can no longer satisfy this need, as Moore's law (exponential hardware scaling), interconnection density, and the von Neumann architecture reach their limits. With its superior speed and reconfigurability, analog photonics can provide some relief to these problems; however, complex applications of analog photonics have remained largely unexplored due to the absence of a robust photonic integration industry. Recently, the landscape for commercially-manufacturable photonic chips has been changing rapidly and now promises to achieve economies of scale previously enjoyed solely by microelectronics. The scientific community has set out to build bridges between the domains of photonic device physics and neural networks, giving rise to the field of \emph{neuromorphic photonics}. This article reviews the recent progress in integrated neuromorphic photonics. We provide an overview of neuromorphic computing, discuss the associated technology (microelectronic and photonic) platforms and compare their metric performance. We discuss photonic neural network approaches and challenges for integrated neuromorphic photonic processors while providing an in-depth description of photonic neurons and a candidate interconnection architecture. We conclude with a future outlook of neuro-inspired photonic processing.Comment: 28 pages, 19 figure

Generalized Adaptive Network Coding Aided Successive Relaying Based Noncoherent Cooperation

A generalized adaptive network coding (GANC) scheme is conceived for a multi-user, multi-relay scenario, where the multiple users transmit independent information streams to a common destination with the aid of multiple relays. The proposed GANC scheme is developed from adaptive network coded cooperation (ANCC), which aims for a high flexibility in order to: 1) allow arbitrary channel coding schemes to serve as the cross-layer network coding regime; 2) provide any arbitrary trade-off between the throughput and reliability by adjusting the ratio of the source nodes and the cooperating relay nodes. Furthermore, we incorporate the proposed GANC scheme in a novel successive relaying aided network (SRAN) in order to recover the typical 50% half-duplex relaying-induced throughput loss. However, it is unrealistic to expect that in addition to carrying out all the relaying functions, the relays could additionally estimate the source-to-relay channels. Hence noncoherent detection is employed in order to obviate the power-hungry channel estimation. Finally, we intrinsically amalgamate our GANC scheme with the joint network-channel coding (JNCC) concept into a powerful three-stage concatenated architecture relying on iterative detection, which is specifically designed for the destination node (DN). The proposed scheme is also capable of adapting to rapidly time-varying network topologies, while relying on energy-efficient detection

Simulation of droplet-based microfluidic lab-on-a-chip applications

This paper was presented at the 3rd Micro and Nano Flows Conference (MNF2011), which was held at the Makedonia Palace Hotel, Thessaloniki in Greece. The conference was organised by Brunel University and supported by the Italian Union of Thermofluiddynamics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University of Thessaly, IPEM, the Process Intensification Network, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Heat Transfer Society, HEXAG - the Heat Exchange Action Group, and the Energy Institute.Miniaturization of biological and chemical assays in lab-on-a-chip systems is a highly topical field of research. Droplet-based microfluidic chips are types of these miniaturized systems. They expand the capability of assays with special features that are unreached by traditional workflows. In particular, small sample volumes, independent separated reaction units, high throughput, automation and parallelization of assays are prominent features of droplet-based microfluidic devices. Full custom centric design of droplet-based microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technology implicates a high system integration level and design complexity. Therefore advanced development methodologies are needed, comparable with the methods in electronic design automation. Our design and simulation toolkit meets these requirements for an agile and low-risk development of custom lab-on-a-chip devices. The system simulation approach enables a fast and precise prediction of complex microfluidic networks. This fact is confirmed by reference and benchmark experiments. The results show that the simulation correctly reproduces the experimental measurements.The German BMBF and the EU in the projects DiNaMiD, signature 0315591B and NoE Photonics4Life, Grant Agreement number: 224014

EXIT-charts-aided hybrid multiuser detector for multicarrier interleave-division multiple access

A generically applicable hybrid multiuser detector (MUD) concept is proposed by appropriately activating different MUDs in consecutive turbo iterations based on the mutual information (MI) gain. It is demonstrated that the proposed hybrid MUD is capable of approaching the optimal Bayesian MUD's performance despite its reduced complexity, which is at a modestly increased complexity in comparison with that of the suboptimum soft interference cancellation (SoIC) MU

Cooperative differential space-time spreading for the asynchronous relay aided CDMA uplink using interference rejection spreading code

Abstract—This letter proposes a differential Space–Time Coding (STC) scheme designed for asynchronous cooperative networks, where neither channel estimation nor symbol-level synchroniza-tion is required at the cooperating nodes. More specifically, our system employs differential encoding during the broadcast phase and a Space–Time Spreading (STS)-based amplify-and-forward scheme during the cooperative phase in conjunction with inter-ference rejection direct sequence spreading codes, namely Loosely Synchronized (LS) codes. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed Cooperative Differential STS (CDSTS) scheme is ca-pable of combating the effects of asynchronous uplink transmis-sions without any channel state information. Index Terms—Asynchronous cooperation, cooperative diversity, differential space–time spreading, loosely synchronized codes. I

Scalability of broadcast performance in wireless network-on-chip

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) are currently the paradigm of choice to interconnect the cores of a chip multiprocessor. However, conventional NoCs may not suffice to fulfill the on-chip communication requirements of processors with hundreds or thousands of cores. The main reason is that the performance of such networks drops as the number of cores grows, especially in the presence of multicast and broadcast traffic. This not only limits the scalability of current multiprocessor architectures, but also sets a performance wall that prevents the development of architectures that generate moderate-to-high levels of multicast. In this paper, a Wireless Network-on-Chip (WNoC) where all cores share a single broadband channel is presented. Such design is conceived to provide low latency and ordered delivery for multicast/broadcast traffic, in an attempt to complement a wireline NoC that will transport the rest of communication flows. To assess the feasibility of this approach, the network performance of WNoC is analyzed as a function of the system size and the channel capacity, and then compared to that of wireline NoCs with embedded multicast support. Based on this evaluation, preliminary results on the potential performance of the proposed hybrid scheme are provided, together with guidelines for the design of MAC protocols for WNoC.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version