New ONR grant to enable distributed photonic processing

The Youngblood Photonics Lab has been awarded a new research grant from ONR entitled, “Distributed Coherent Optical Computing via Injection-Locked Photonic Networks,” which started March 2026. This grant will enable us to explore methods for coherently networking distributed optical processors and sensors over fiber while addressing the bottlenecks of analog-to-digital and electrical-to-optical conversions. If successful, this should allow us to scale optical compute beyond the boundaries of a single chip while maintaining the high speed and low energy advantages of optical processing. Check out our first paper on the topic which is available on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13450