Microsoft Doing Light Work With Analog Optical Computer Prototype

Microsoft researchers in Cambridge have unveiled its latest iteration of an Analog Optical Computer (AOC) and have inevitably incorporated AI into the technology's capabilities.

The AOC harnesses light as a medium for solving complex problems, notably optimization challenges found in the worlds of logistics, finance, and healthcare. It uses different light intensities to perform operations such as addition and multiplication. It's also considerably faster at certain problem-solving activities than traditional computers, we're told.

The prototype is built from commercially available parts, including micro-LEDs, optical lenses, and sensors from smartphone cameras. Since the underlying technology – shunting photons along fiber optic cables – is decades old, much of the hardware does not need to be expensively exotic.

Researcher Jiaqi Chu is on the team that built the AOC (Credit: Microsoft)

While the aim is for a durable and practical machine that can operate at room temperature, and yet still be 100 times faster and 100 times more energy efficient when solving certain problems than conventional hardware, it's highly unlikely to be appear on a desktop anytime soon.

Francesca Parmigiani, the Microsoft principal research manager who leads the team developing the AOC, said the system is "not a general-purpose computer, but what we believe is that we can find a wide range of applications and real-world problems where the computer can be extremely successful."

The machine has 256 weights, up from the 64 of the previous generation. "More weights mean the capacity to solve more complex problems," Microsoft said. "As researchers refine the AOC, adding more and more micro-LEDs, it could eventually have millions or even more than a billion weights."

Microsoft has also shared its "optimization solver" algorithm and its digital twin, allowing other researchers to explore the company's ideas and propose new problems to solve, as well as suggest ways to address them. At present, Microsoft's researchers are very excited about clinical applications, such as reconstructing MRI scans, and financial applications. Microsoft is involved with Barclays Bank to deal with the optimization challenges faced by clearinghouses when working out the most efficient way to settle financial obligations between multiple parties.

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And then, of course, there is AI. "Because of the way the AOC operates, computing a problem again and again in search of a 'fixed point,' it has the potential to do a kind of energy-demanding reasoning that current LLMs running on GPUs struggle with – state tracking – at a much lower cost in energy," Microsoft said.

Hitesh Ballani, who directs research on future AI infrastructure at the Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge, reckons the tech has the potential to be a game changer, but cautioned that there remains a steep hill to climb before it can move from the lab to something commercially viable.

"We've been able to convince ourselves and hopefully a broader segment of the world that, well, actually, you know what? There are real applications for the AOC," he said.

Microsoft is not the only company working in optical computing. IBM, for example, has talked up research into co-packaged optics to replace electrical interconnects in datacenters to bump up performance for computing applications. Other proposals and research around analog optical computing have previously shown up in publications such as Nature over the years.

The Microsoft team reckons future generations of the AOC will be created every two years and envisions the device finding its way into the racks of an Azure datacenter. ®