Leveraging Photonic Interconnects for Scalable and Efficient Fully Homomorphic Encryption

2025-06-15

AI Summary

Constrained by bandwidth limitations of electrical interconnects, existing fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) accelerators struggle to support memory-intensive workloads. To address this, we propose OptoLink—the first scalable, silicon-photonics-integrated FHE accelerator architecture. Our approach innovatively incorporates wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical interconnects into FHE hardware acceleration, enabling photonic-electronic co-designed dataflow mapping and control. Implemented using a 128-channel silicon photonic integrated circuit, OptoLink achieves a peak inter-chip and on-chip throughput of 1.6 TB/s—300× higher than state-of-the-art electrical interconnects—while substantially reducing communication latency and preserving scalability. This work establishes a high-bandwidth, low-latency, and scalable optical interconnect infrastructure essential for practical FHE acceleration.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Federated Web and WoT systems, including distributed, federated and edge-based data processing
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Efficiency and scalability of Web search engines

Abstract

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) facilitates secure computations on encrypted data but imposes significant demands on memory bandwidth and computational power. While current FHE accelerators focus on optimizing computation, they often face bandwidth limitations that result in performance bottlenecks, particularly in memory-intensive operations. This paper presents OptoLink, a scalable photonic interconnect architecture designed to address these bandwidth and latency challenges in FHE systems. OptoLink achieves a throughput of 1.6 TB/s with 128 channels, providing 300 times the bandwidth of conventional electrical interconnects. The proposed architecture improves data throughput, scalability, and reduces latency, making it an effective solution for meeting the high memory and data transfer requirements of modern FHE accelerators.

Problem

• Addresses bandwidth limitations in Fully Homomorphic Encryption systems
• Improves data throughput and scalability for FHE accelerators
• Reduces latency in memory-intensive FHE operations

Innovation

• OptoLink photonic interconnect for FHE
• 1.6 TB/s throughput with 128 channels
• 300x bandwidth over electrical interconnects