Newsroom / Announcement
TensaCo introduces PHASER, an optical approach to AI acceleration
TensaCo today introduced PHASER, a neural accelerator that performs computation with light instead of electricity.
In PHASER, light circulates between two mirrors through a stack of programmable spatial light modulators. Each pass through the stack performs one step of computation, and the interference of light does the arithmetic. The design is built around components the telecom and display industries already manufacture at scale.
In TensaCo’s energy model, one step of a 135,000-neuron dense layer on a single megapixel of optics uses about 1,000 times less energy than the same step on a GPU. At today’s simulated scale the energy per step matches an equally capable digital system; the advantage grows with scale. A step takes 6.7 nanoseconds in simulation.
PHASER is in the research stage. The simulator, experiments and energy model are published on GitHub.
Media contact: hello@tensaco.ai
