Fully reconfigurable coherent optical vector–matrix multiplication

Optics is a promising platform in which to help realize the next generation of fast, parallel, and energy-efficient computation. We demonstrate a reconfigurable free-space optical multiplier that is capable of over 3000 computations in parallel, using spatial light modulators with a pixel resolution of only 340×340. This enables vector-matrix multiplication and parallel vector-vector multiplication with vector size of up to 56. Our design is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to simultaneously support optical implementation of reconfigurable, large-sized, and real-valued linear algebraic operations. Such an optical multiplier can serve as a building block of special-purpose optical processors such as optical neural networks and optical Ising machines.