Science centres

Centre for Neuromorphic Photonics

Today's most powerful supercomputer, the Frontier, reaches the estimated processing power of the human brain but uses a million times more energy. While the human brain runs on about 20 watts, the Frontier consumes approximately 21 megawatts.

What does the Centre do?

At the Centre for Neuromorphic Photonics, we research and develop artificial intelligence devices inspired by the human brain structure and functioning. Instead of a separate processor and memory, our devices combine computing and memory into artificial neurons that, unlike biological structures, use photonic instead of electronic signals. Why do we research this? Because photonic (light) signals enable higher operating speed, higher processing power and lower energy consumption.

Our work includes research into future AI technologies with the aim of overcoming the limitations relating to the energy efficiency of operations, memory capacity and calculation speed, imposed by the development of robotics, autonomous vehicles and chatbots. The hardware accelerators we are working on are widely used in biology, medicine, economics, meteorology, energy and all other areas that require the processing of a large amount of data.

Centre Head

Prof. Dr Jasna Crnjanski

Associate Professor at the Department of Microelectronics and Technical Physics of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering

Jasna Crnjanski is an associate professor at the Department of Microelectronics at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, where she teaches courses in physics, physical electronics and optical communications. Since 2017, she has represented the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in the Board of Directors of the Serbian Society of Physicists and she is the supervisor of the student branch of the Optical Society of America at the University of Belgrade. She is also a member of the Optical Society of Serbia and the Serbian Physical Society. Her research interests include modelling the optical properties of semiconductor quantum nanostructures, testing the static and dynamic characteristics of semiconductor lasers and optical amplifiers for applications in neuromorphic photonics and the generation of optical frequency combs. For many years, she has been engaged as an expert lecturer at the “Petnica” research station within the programme of applied physics and electronics, and recently also at the “PFE” science and engineering centre. Since 2019, she has been the director of the Institute of Physics of the Technical Faculty, University of Belgrade. She is the co-author of two university exercise books and more than 40 scientific papers published in journals and conference proceedings of international importance. She won three awards for scientific research results.

Official page

Ongoing projects

  • Research of recurrent neural networks in reservoir computing architecture
    (within the ORCA-LAB project under the auspices of the Science Fund)
  • Experimental and theoretical research of photonic activation units for artificial neurons
  • Implementation of photonic activation units in different types of artificial optical neural networks

Learn more about the work and activities of the Centre at the ORCA-LAB project page: orca-lab.etf.bg.ac.rs.