Programmable Photonic Architecture Solving Systems of Ordinary Differential Equations

Photonic integrated hardware accelerators promise to be a viable technology to complement digital electronic devices in applications requiring massive computing, such as high-performance computers and artificial intelligence systems. In this work we report on a fully programmable photonic architecture implementing an analogue solver of systems of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). We show how to map the coefficients of an arbitrary system of ODEs onto the optical parameters of the photonic circuit, which consists of a recursive mesh of tunable Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs). Numerical simulations are carried out to evaluate, both in the frequency and time-domain, the error between the exact solution of the ODE system and the device response, and conditions to minimize such error are provided.