Abstract
Conventional electronic Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) accelerators focus on architecture design and numerical computation optimization to improve the training speed. Optical technology with low energy consumption and high transmission speed are expected to play an important role in the next generation of computing architectures. To provide a better understanding of optical technology used in ANN acceleration, we present a comprehensive review for the optical implementations of ANNs accelerator in this paper. We propose a classification of existing solutions which are categorized into optical computing acceleration and optical communication acceleration according to optical effects and optical architectures. Moreover, we discuss the challenges for these photonic neural network acceleration approaches to highlight the most promising future research opportunities in this field.