The scientific team of the AUTH Informatics Department created the fastest processor Artificial Intelligence in the world, which consists of photonic neurons and works with light instead of electricity.

The processor is based on a original photonic neuron architecture, which allows the implementation of algebraic operations at very high speeds, simultaneously utilizing original Neural Network training techniques for optimal adaptation of algorithms to the special characteristics of light. This combination led to the experimental demonstration of a photonic processor operating at speeds up to 50GHz (>25 times faster than the speed of modern GPU processors) with the simultaneous possibility of 10 times lower power consumption.

AUTH’s Department of Informatics research highlights the significant speed and energy efficiency advantages provided by the use of light in the implementation of multiplication and addition operations, and allows processors to operate at speeds many times faster than today’s corresponding NVIDIA GPU and TPU computing units of Google.

The research results have been published in international scientific journals such as: NatureCommunications, Journal of LightwaveTechnology, IEEE Journal of SelectedTopicsonQuantumElectronics and SPIEAdvancedPhotonics and also in the international press, such as ScienceX, PIC Magazine, Compound Semiconductor, Nanowerk etc.

In March 2023, part of the results were presented, through three scientific announcements, at the world’s largest Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC), in San Diego, USA. The three main researchers of the announcements were the PhD candidates of the Department of Informatics of the AUTH, Apostolos Tsakiridis, Georgios Giamougiannis and Christos Pappas, supervised by the Professor of the Department of Informatics of the AUTH Nikolaos Pleros. The three postdoctoral fellows were selected among the seven finalists, by the international Committee of the Conference, among 350 students from all over the world, for the prestigious international OFC Corning Student Award. Thus, three of the seven finalists of the global Competition were students of the Department of Informatics of AUTH.

The advantages of photonics technology in the area of ​​information processing using neural networks is that it utilizes data in the form of light and photonic integration technologies to implement deep neural networks, which try to “mimic” the function of the human brain and human neurons in field of computers, with the aim of faster and more efficient processing of information.

The specific scientific field is today a tfast growing technology industry, which began to be intensively researched about five years ago, with the AUTh Informatics department being among the three pioneers, along with two of the leading American universities, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Princeton University.

The pioneering research of AUTH in this particular field, it was based on the interdisciplinary collaboration of the Wireless and Photonic Systems and Networks Research Group (WinPhoS, http://winphos.web.auth.gr/ ) of KEDEK AUTH and the Computational Intelligence and Deep Learning Research Group of the Department of Informatics of AUTH ( CIDL Research group, https://cidl.csd.auth.gr/), with scientific supervisors Prof. Nikos Pleros and Prof. Anastasios Tefa, respectively, from the Department of Informatics, AUTH.