SimPhony: A Device-Circuit-Architecture Cross-Layer Modeling and Simulation Framework for Heterogeneous Electronic-Photonic AI System

Electronic-photonic integrated circuits (EPICs) offer transformative potential for next-generation high-performance AI, but they require interdisciplinary advances across devices, circuits, architecture, and design automation. The complexity of these hybrid systems makes it challenging even for doma...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2025 62nd ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) pp. 1 - 7
Main Authors: Yin, Ziang, Zhang, Meng, Gangi, Nicholas, Huang, Rena, Zhang, Jeff, Gu, Jiaqi
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 22.06.2025
Subjects:
Accuracy
Analytical models
Artificial intelligence
Computer architecture
Cross layer design
Design automation
Hardware
Photonics
Technological innovation
Training
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Summary:Electronic-photonic integrated circuits (EPICs) offer transformative potential for next-generation high-performance AI, but they require interdisciplinary advances across devices, circuits, architecture, and design automation. The complexity of these hybrid systems makes it challenging even for domain experts to understand distinct behaviors and interactions across the design stack. The lack of a flexible, accurate, fast, and easy-to-use EPIC AI system simulation framework significantly limits the exploration of hardware innovations and system evaluations on common benchmarks. To address this gap, we propose SimPhony, a cross-layer modeling and simulation framework for heterogeneous electronic-photonic AI systems. SimPhony offers a platform that enables (1) generic, extensible hardware topology representation that supports heterogeneous multi-core architectures with diverse photonic tensor core designs; (2) optics-specific dataflow modeling with unique multi-dimensional parallelism and reuse beyond spatial/temporal dimensions; (3) data-aware energy modeling with realistic device responses, layout-aware area estimation, link budget analysis, and bandwidth-adaptive memory modeling; and (4) seamless integration with model training framework for hardware/software co-simulation. By providing a unified, versatile, and high-fidelity simulation platform, SimPhony enables researchers to innovate and evaluate EPIC AI hardware across multiple domains, facilitating the next leap in emerging AI hardware. Our code is open-sourced at link 1 . 1 https://github.com/ScopeX-ASU/SimPhony
DOI:10.1109/DAC63849.2025.11132427