PhotonNTT: Energy-Efficient Parallel Photonic Number Theoretic Transform Accelerator

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) presents a promising opportunity to remove privacy barriers in various scenarios including cloud computing and secure database search, by enabling computation on encrypted data. However, integrating FHE with real-world applications remains challenging due to its significant computational overhead. In the FHE scheme, Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) consumes the primary computing resources and has great potential for acceleration. For the first time, we present a photonic NTT accelerator, PhotonNTT, with high energy efficiency and parallelism to address the above challenge. Our approach involves formulating the NTT into matrix-vector multiplication (MVM) operations and mapping the data flow into parallel photonic MVM units. A dedicated data mapping scheme is proposed to introduce free spectral range (FSR) and distributed RAM design into the system, which enables a high bit-wise parallelism level. The system's reliability is validated through the Monte-Carlo BER analysis. The experimen-tal evaluation shows that the proposed architecture outperforms SOTA CiM-based NTT accelerators with an improvement of 50x in throughput and 63x improvement in energy efficiency.