End-to-end all-optical in-sensor computing system using photonic integrated circuits.

Authors

Zian Xiao, Zhihao Ren, Yangyang Zhuge, Zixuan Zhang, Yan Yang, Bowei Dong, Chengkuo Lee

Published in

Science advances. Volume 12. Issue 34. Pages eaef8657. Aug 21, 2026. Epub Aug 21, 2026.

Abstract

Photonic sensors play an increasingly important role in chemical analysis, but conventional systems rely on sequential wavelength scanning and extensive electronic post-processing, leading to large data redundancy, high latency, and excessive energy consumption. Here, we introduce an end-to-end all-optical in-sensor computing system based on photonic integrated circuits that merges sensing and computing in the optical domain. The system integrates a photonic waveguide sensor and a microring weight bank on a single chip for linear processing, while nonlinear activation is implemented using an erbium-doped fiber amplifier. By performing spectral compression, this system enables real-time optical-domain computing with up to 6-bit precision. The system achieves a classification accuracy of 94.2% across 27 liquid-mixture classes and concentration prediction for mixture chemicals. Compared with conventional photonic sensing systems, the proposed architecture reduces inference latency by a factor of 4.48 and energy consumption by a factor of 11.47. These results establish a compact, low-redundancy, and energy-efficient paradigm for intelligent photonic sensing at the edge.

PMID:
42627886
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 22 Aug 2026.

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