This breakthrough research not only improves the performance of photonic computing chips, but also provides new possibilities for future applications such as biometric recognition, telemedicine, and edge AI computing. As claimed, this architecture can further improve parallel computing capabilities by increasing the number of wavelengths and microwave multiplexing channels, laying the foundation for the commercialization of photonic computing chips. However, as shown in Fig. 1, photonic computing still faces a number of challenges at present, including:

  1. i.

    Optimize the manufacturing process of optical components to overcome the significant insertion loss and phase error accumulation associated with large-scale integrated optical circuits. This will facilitate the expansion of computational network layers to enhance the capability of optical computing in handling complex tasks.

  2. ii.

    Improve the reconfigurability of optical circuits to expand the computational infrastructure of photonic computing, enabling adaptability to a wider range of computational tasks.

  3. iii.

    Introduce on-chip nonlinear photonic activation technologies to extend the depth of photonic network computing and integrate photonic computing with existing electronic computing technologies, creating a comprehensive computational ecosystem.

  4. iv.

    Enhance the efficiency, speed, and sensitivity of optoelectronic converters to improve the overall energy efficiency of optical computing.

Fig. 1figure 1

Schematic view of the challenges and applications of photonic computing

Future research will focus on addressing these challenges to develop hybrid photonic computing architectures, explore new optical materials, and build end-to-end photonic computing application platforms. With the continued advancement of photonic computing in photonic integrated circuits and optical neural networks, photonic computing will be applied to a wider range of real-world scenarios, from intelligent robots and autonomous vehicles to medical imaging and real-time video processing. Additionally, photonic multidimensional computational capabilities will emerge as a solution to traditional electronic computing challenges, potentially driving the advancement of artificial intelligence and machine vision to new stages.