Public Summary of End-of-Project Results

As the saying goes (at least in England) “all good things must come to an end” – and so the Fun-COMP project is now concluded. We have, in our opinion, achieved remarkable things, including: the first-ever all-optical neurosynaptic system, the first-ever integrated phase-change tensor processing core, the first-ever integrated photonic correlation engine, the first-ever phase-change enhanced photonic reservoir computer system, the first ever PhC spiking nanolaser device. You can find a summary of some of these acheivements in the report available via this link (and of course via the innumerable publications listed on our publictions pages)

Fun-COMP Exhibition at META22 Conference, Spain

Now that Covid travel restrictions are finally being wound down, and more people are returning to in-person meetings, we were pleased to hold an exhibition of Fun-COMP technologies and achievemnents as part of the META22 conference held in Torremolinos, Spain in July 2022 – where several Fun-COMP researchers (David Wright, Harish Bhaskaran, Wolfram Pernice) were keynote or invited speakers. We also held a joint summer school on plasmonics in integrated photonics with the H2020 project Phemtronics (see http://www.phemtronics.eu/).

For more information on our exhibition see the report downloadable via this link. For more details on the META conference itself see https://metaconferences.org/META/index.php/META2022.

Fun-COMP Researchers Publish Future Perspective on Photonic Computing in Nature Photonics

Fun-COMP researchers David Wright, Harish Bhaskaran and Wolfram Pernice along with colleagues form the USA Prof Paul Pruncal and Drs Bhavin Shastri, Alex Tait and Thomas de Lima have published their view of the future of photonic computing in the leading journal Nature Photonics – see the paper at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-020-00754-y

A New Roadmap for Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering

A major new work published full open access by the UK Institute of Physics roadmapping the future for neuromorphic computing has been co-authored by Fun-COMP researchers Drs Johannes Feldmann, Xuan Li and Profs Harish Bhaskaran and Wolfram Pernice. It is not only concerned with photonic computing (the focus of Fun-COMP), but looks also at analogue and digital electronic approaches. To view the roadmap see https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2634-4386/ac4a83/meta

(More) Conversations in Photonics

Another in our series of ‘conversations’ in Photonics – this time we were very excited to have keynote talks from Dr Nick Harris, founder and CEO of Lightmatter Inc (see https://lightmatter.co/) who have developed a photonic coprocessor that can be fully integrated with conventional electronic systems – and from Prof Demetri Psaltis, EPFL (see https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lo/) who gave us an intriguing insight into past and future developments in optical neural networks. A report on this meeting is available via this link.

Public summary of mid-project results published

Now we are half-way through Fun-COMP’s project lifetime, we have published a public summary of key results obtained so far – download it via this link

Conversations in Oxford – Future of Photonics in Computing, Oxford – 22 Aug 2019

This event saw the participation of many of the Fun-COMP collaborators. It served as a platform for an informal discussion on the “Photonics and Computing” topic, among academics, researchers and students, which revealed to be extremely valuable. Within this, a much appreciated contribution is due to Prof. Paul Prucnal (University of Princeton, USA), whose research laid the foundations of the neural photonic network development. For more information and a copy of Prof Prucnal’s presentation, click here.

Cross-Disciplinary training session, Oxford University, Oxford – 18 Mar 2019

Coincidentally with the 13th Month Progress Meeting, a cross-disciplinary seminary has been hold.
Dr. Abu Sebastian and Dr. Simon Stringer delivered two interesting talks, revolving around the exploitation of phase-change materials for neuromorphic computing (Abu), and on the mathematical modelling and simulation approaches of biological neural systems (Simon).
The respective presentation files can be found at this link.

Project Kick-Off Meeting, London – 11 Apr 2018

This was held at the headquarters of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, London on April 11th 2018 (postponed from its original date of March 2nd, when London was virtually cut-off by unseasonable snow falls!).