Systems and methods for designing photonic computational architectures

Abstract

Methods and systems for designing a photonic computational architecture including a plurality of optical components. At least some of the methods include: defining a loss function within a simulation space composed of a plurality of voxels, the simulation space encompassing the plurality of optical components; defining an initial structure for the photonic computational architecture in the simulation space, at least some of the voxels corresponding to each of the plurality of optical components and having a dimension smaller than an operative wavelength of the computational architecture; determining values for at least one structural parameter and/or at least one functional parameter for each of the plurality of optical components using a numerical solver to solve Maxwell's equations; and defining a final structure of the photonic computational architecture based on the values for the one or more structural and/or functional parameters.