Integrated photonic metasystem for image classifications at telecommunication wavelength

Miniaturized image classifiers are potential for revolutionizing their applications in optical communication, autonomous vehicles, and healthcare. With subwavelength structure enabled directional diffraction and dispersion engineering, the light propagation through multi-layer metasurfaces achieves wavelength-selective image recognitions on a silicon photonic platform at telecommunication wavelength. The metasystems implement high-throughput vector-by-matrix multiplications, enabled by near 103 nanoscale phase shifters as weight elements within 0.135 mm2 footprints. The diffraction manifested computing capability incorporates the fabrication and measurement related phase fluctuations, and thus the pre-trained metasystem can handle uncertainties in inputs without post-tuning. Here we demonstrate three functional metasystems: a 15-pixel spatial pattern classifier that reaches near 90% accuracy with femtosecond inputs, a multi-channel wavelength demultiplexer, and a hyperspectral image classifier. The diffractive metasystem provides an alternative machine learning architecture for photonic integrated circuits, with densely integrated phase shifters, spatially multiplexed throughput, and data processing capabilities. Metasystem architectures are attractive alternatives to waveguide-based integrated photonic processors due to the subwavelength structures. Here, the authors report a 1D passive silicon photonic metasystem with near 90% spatial pattern classification accuracy at telecommunication wavelength.