Resumen
For over 5 decades, digital electronics has covered the increasing demand for computing power
thanks to a periodic doubling of transistor density in integrated circuits. Currently, such scaling
law is reaching its fundamental limit, leading to the emergence of a large gamut of applications
that cannot be supported by digital electronics, specifically, those that involve real-time analog
multi-data processing, e.g., medical diagnostic imaging, drug design and robotic control, among
others. Here, an analog computing approach implemented in a reconfigurable non-electronic
technology such as programmable integrated photonics (PIP) can be more efficient than digital
electronics to perform these emerging applications. However, actual computing models were not
conceived to extract the benefits of PIP. The aim of ANBIT is to develop an entirely new class of
computation theory - termed Analog Photonic Computation (APC) - specifically designed to unleash
the full potential of PIP technology. The core concept revolves around the idea of performing
analog operations on a new unit of information, the analog bit or anbit, conceived as a
two-dimensional analog function and matched to the building block of PIP circuits. ANBIT will reach
its objectives by: l) developing the theory of APC based on operations (gates) of anbits, 2)
translating the principles of APC to the design of PIP circuits by concatenating single- and
multi-anbit gates, 3) fabricating, packaging, testing and validating silicon PIP chips capable of
implementing complex APC architectures, 4) designing, coordinating, setting and performing
experiments that will prove the unique potential of APC in computational and signal processing
applications with huge takeover. ANBIT will deliver extracts the full potential of PIP technology,
which in turn will have a crucial impact on fundamental
and applied research and on our information society.
