Integrated Photonics Architectures for Residue Number System Computations

Abstract

Residue number system (RNS) can represent large numbers as sets of relatively smaller prime numbers. Architectures for such systems can be inherently parallel, as arithmetic operations on large numbers can then be performed on elements of those sets individually. As RNS arithmetic is based on modulo operations, an RNS computational unit is usually constructed as a network of switches that are controlled to perform a specific computation, giving rise to the processing in network (PIN) paradigm. In this work, we explore using integrated photonics switches to build different high-speed architectures of RNS computational units based on multistage interconnection networks. The inherent parallelism of RNS, as well as very low energy of integrated phontonics are two primary reasons for the promise of this direction. We study the trade-offs between the area and the control complexity of five different architectures. We show that our newly proposed architecture, which is based on arbitrary size Benes (AS-Benes) networks, saves up to 90% of the area and is up to 16 times faster than the other architectures.