Analog optical computing primitives in silicon photonics

Optical computing accelerators help alleviate bandwidth and power consumption bottlenecks in electronics. We show an approach to implementing logarithmic-type analog co-processors in silicon photonics and use it to perform the exponentiation operation and the recovery of a signal in the presence of multiplicative distortion. The function is realized by exploiting nonlinear-absorption-enhanced Raman amplification saturation in a silicon waveguide.