Lightator: An Optical Near-Sensor Accelerator with Compressive Acquisition Enabling Versatile Image Processing

Mehrdad Morsali, Brendan Reidy, Deniz Najafi, Sepehr Tabrizchi, Mohsen Imani, Mahdi Nikdast, Arman Roohi, Ramtin Zand, Shaahin Angizi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper proposes a high-performance and energy-efficient optical near-sensor accelerator for vision applications, called Lightator. Harnessing the promising efficiency offered by photonic devices, Lightator features innovative compressive acquisition of input frames and fine-grained convolution operations for low-power and versatile image processing at the edge for the first time. This will substantially diminish the energy consumption and latency of conversion, transmission, and processing within the established cloud-centric architecture as well as recently designed edge accelerators. Our device-to-architecture simulation results show that with favorable accuracy, Lightator achieves 84.4 Kilo FPS/W and reduces power consumption by a factor of ∼24× and 73× on average compared with existing photonic accelerators and GPU baseline.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 61st ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, DAC 2024
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9798400706011
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 7 2024
Event61st ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, DAC 2024 - San Francisco, United States
Duration: Jun 23 2024Jun 27 2024

Publication series

NameProceedings - Design Automation Conference
ISSN (Print)0738-100X

Conference

Conference61st ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, DAC 2024
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Francisco
Period6/23/246/27/24

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Modeling and Simulation

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