IBM

Overview

IBM is a multinational technology and consulting corporation with a significant research arm, IBM Research, operating labs across the world including Europe (Zurich, Rüschlikon, Switzerland). IBM Research Europe has been active in photonics for computing for over two decades, with concrete deployments of co-packaged optics in the IBM Power 775 supercomputer (2011) and ongoing research into adiabatic waveguide coupling and in-memory optical computing.

IBM's photonics work spans two distinct domains: (1) optics for computing — using optical interconnects to address the bandwidth-compute imbalance that has grown to 60,000× (compute) versus 30× (interconnect) over 20 years, and (2) optical in-memory computing — using silicon nitride MZI convolution processors to perform matrix operations at 30+ GSps, with demonstrated efficiency of 2.49 TOps/W (comparable to but not yet exceeding GPU performance).