Photonic transformer chip: interference is all you need (IMAGE)

Chinese Society for Optical Engineering

Photonic transformer chip: interference is all you need

Caption

Researchers from Xidian University have developed a groundbreaking photonic transformer chip (PTC) that uses optical interference—the interaction of light waves—as its fundamental operation, replacing the multiply-accumulate units found in electronic chips. This "all-interference" approach, termed Kramers-Kronig attention (KKA), is intrinsically more efficient for executing the attention mechanism that powers modern AI.

Credit

Tian et al., PhotonIX (2025)

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CC BY

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