On September 3, Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK announced that its team has successfully built a novel Analog Optical Computer (AOC) using Micro LED light sources, optical lenses, and a smartphone camera sensor. The research result was published in the latest issue of Nature and is expected to enable breakthroughs in financial settlement, medical imaging, and artificial intelligence.

Unlike conventional digital computers that rely on binary logic, the AOC performs computation through optical physical processes, helping bypass some bottlenecks of digital computing. Researchers envision that, for certain problems, the AOC could achieve up to a hundredfold improvement in speed and energy efficiency, while operating at room temperature with low power consumption.

The AOC has already demonstrated potential in two key fields. In finance, Microsoft has partnered with Barclays Bank to optimize securities clearing and settlement. In a test involving 28,000 trades across 1,800 participants, the AOC showed high efficiency and accuracy in problem-solving.

In healthcare, Microsoft researchers applied “digital twin” to reconstruct MRI scans with a good degree of accuracy, which could theoretically reduce scanning times from 30 minutes to just 5 minutes—significantly improving utilization of medical resources.

The team emphasized that the AOC is not a general-purpose computer but a domain-specific architecture tailored for optimization problems and select AI tasks, leveraging the intensity variations of photons passing through sensors to perform addition and multiplication.

Currently, the AOC has scaled its model parameters from 64 to 256, with the potential to reach millions or even billions by integrating more Micro LEDs. Such expansion would enable more complex computations while further miniaturizing the device.

For AI applications, Microsoft researchers have described that the AOC can run simple machine learning workloads and excels in energy-intensive inference tasks such as “state tracking.” Estimates suggest that the AOC could deliver roughly 100 times greater energy efficiency compared with today’s GPU.

Looking ahead, the team plans to release a new generation of AOC every two years, gradually scaling its size and capabilities. Microsoft believes the technology will play a pivotal role in financial transaction optimization, accelerated medical imaging, and AI computation.

It is also worth noting that Microsoft has been consistently exploring Micro LED technology in its latest research projects. Previously, its research team developed MOSAIC, an optical interconnect system based on Micro LED. By employing hundreds of low-speed parallel Micro LED channels, MOSAIC enables an ultra-low-power, long-distance, high-reliability, and scalable “wide and slow” (WaS) communication architecture.

(Photo credit: Microsoft)

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