Variable Bit-Width All-Optical Content-Addressable Memory Enabled by Sb2Se3 for Similarity Search

Mar 3, 2026 by Yi Guo, Xinmeng Hao, Yibo Zhang, Guangsong Yuan, Hongxiang Guo, Bing Song, Jian Wu, Qingjiang Li (Photonics)

DOI 10.3390/photonics13030249

We built a variable bit-width all-optical CAM using multi-segment modulators with Sb2Se3 that compress N-bit binaries into single analog photonic units, letting you trade precision, capacity, noise immunity, and energy on the fly and support Hamming plus nonlinear distance metrics without DACs. Fabricated a 6-element 3-bit SiN‑SOI prototype, validated kNN on real datasets, and showed mode-dependent accuracy vs noise and sub-pJ/bit energies—fast, reconfigurable optical similarity search with real device data.

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