Floating-point multiplication unit and floating point photonic tensor accelerator

A photonic unit for floating point vector multiplication comprising:

• a first optical multiplexer that receives a first optical signal representing an input vector of one or more floating point numbers each encoded using optical modes, each floating-point number includes an exponent mapped to a frequency of light and a representing a significand of the one or more floating point numbers mapped onto a complex amplitude to produce a first multiplexed optical signal;
• a second optical multiplexer that receives a second optical signal each encoded using optical modes representing a second vector of one or more weights corresponding to a size of the input vector and coherent with the first optical signal to produce a second multiplexed optical signal;
• and
• a beam combiner that receives the first multiplexed optical signal from the first optical multiplexer and a second multiplexed optical signal from the second optical multiplexer so as to combine them to produce an interference between the first optical signal and the second optical signal containing multiplication results of the input vector and the second vector in a total interference intensity.