Nokia Bell Labs
labphotonic-computingneural-networkson-chip-trainingsilicon-photonicsresearch-lab
Nokia Bell Labs
Type: Industrial research lab Location: New Providence, NJ Lineage: Historic AT&T / Bell Laboratories; now part of Nokia
The Ashtiani group at Nokia Bell Labs demonstrated the first integrated photonic deep neural network with end-to-end on-chip gradient-descent backpropagation — all linear and nonlinear computations on a single silicon photonic chip. This solves the long-standing problem of on-chip activation-gradient computation in photonic neural networks.
Key Contributions
- First end-to-end on-chip photonic backprop training — Nature 2026 (Vol 651, pp 927-932). (Ashtiani)
- On-chip activation gradient scheme via opto-electronic cascaded IMs — solves previously unsolved problem. (Ashtiani)
- Automatic device-variation compensation — training on the chip adapts to actual device behavior. (Ashtiani)
- 92.5% 2D classification accuracy matching digital reference. (Ashtiani)
Research Team
- Farshid Ashtiani (lead)
- Mohamad Hossein Idjadi
- Kwangwoong Kim
Mentioned In
- Photonic Neural Network — one of three anchor results for 2026
Related Entities
- Lightmatter — commercial complement (inference-focused)