On September 3, Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK announced that its team successfully used Micro LED light sources, optical lenses and smartphone camera sensors to build a new analog optical computer (Analog Optical Computer, AOC). The research results were published in the latest issue of Nature and are expected to provide useful information for financial settlement and medical imaging.Image and artificial intelligence bring breakthrough applications.
Image source: Microsoft
It is reported that, unlike digital computers that rely on binary operations, AOC performs calculations through optical physical processes, which can circumvent some of the bottlenecks of traditional digital computing.. Researchers imagine that AOC can achieve a hundredfold improvement in speed and energy efficiency on specific problems, and has the advantages of normal temperature operation and low energy consumption.
It is reported that AOC has shown potential in two major fields. In the financial field, Microsoft has cooperated with Barclays Bank to simulate and solve the optimization problem of clearing securities transaction settlement. In the test of 28,000 transactions involving 1,800 participants, AOC demonstrated efficient and accurate solving capabilities.
In addition, in the medical field, the Microsoft research team uses AOC's "digital twin" model to reconstruct MRI scans, which can theoretically shorten the scan time from 30 minutes to 5 minutes, significantly improving the utilization of medical resources.
The research team emphasized that AOC is not a general-purpose computer, but a dedicated architecture for optimization problems and specific AI tasks, using the intensity change of photons when they pass through the sensor to achieve addition and multiplication.
Image source: Microsoft
AOC's current model parameters have been expanded from 64 to 256. In the future, by adding more Micro LEDs are expected to reach millions or even billions, AOC can complete more complex operations and the size of the device will shrink as the device becomes miniaturized.
In terms of AI applications, Microsoft researchers have proven that AOC can run simple machine learning tasks and has shown great advantages in high-energy-consuming reasoning tasks such as "state tracking". Research estimates that the energy efficiency of AOC can be improved by about 100 times compared with existing GPUs.
In the future, the research team plans to iterate a new generation of AOC every two years and gradually expand its scale and capabilities. Microsoft Research Group believes that this technology will play a core role in financial transaction optimization, medical imaging acceleration, and AI computing.
It is worth noting that Microsoft has recently continued to apply Micro LED technology to implement its latest research projects. Previously, the Microsoft research team also developed the optical interconnect technology MOSAIC based on Micro LED, using hundreds of low-speed parallel Micro LED channels to achieve a wide and slow (WaS) communication architecture mode with extremely low power consumption, longer transmission, higher reliability, scalability and compatibility.
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