Drs. Sorger and El-Ghazawi awarded a $3M grant from ONR

Profs. Sorger and El-Ghazawi for awarded a $3M grant from Office of Naval Research, ONR. Prof. Sorger is the PI on the grant which is a collaboration between GW, UCLA, UT and Omega Optics Inc., with Prof. El-Ghazawi being a Co-PI at GW. The GW share of the award is about $1.45M. The project entitled 'Photonic Convolutional Processor for Network Edge Computing' develops an accelerator for feature extraction known as convolutional neural network. Unlike other approaches, this project uniquely combines two million optical parallel channels in free-space with 10's GHz-fast signal processing of silicon photonic chip technology. This one-of-a-kind system enables processing of Peta-bytes (even Exa-bytes when scaled-up) of data every second known only from supercomputers yet at the footprint of a desk rather than a football field. Most remarkable, however, is that it can do so at the speed-of-light enabling near real-time information processing, which is not possible in electronics due to parasitic effects of electrons in wires. Such a real-time processor is a sought after technology by the military for timely decision making, but civilian applications such as autonomous and self-driving or flying vehicles could also benefit from it.