A cascaded interferometer-microresonator structure for photonic reservoir computing

Area of Science:

• Photonics
• Optical Computing
• Nonlinear Dynamics

Background:

• Photonic reservoir computing leverages complex system dynamics for computation.
• Implementing on-chip delay elements for silicon photonic reservoirs is challenging due to required delays matching nonlinear effect timescales.
• Existing silicon-based methods face limitations in speed and complexity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a high-speed photonic reservoir computing system.
• To overcome the limitations of silicon nonlinearity and long delay lines.
• To explore a delay-based photonic reservoir utilizing amplitude/phase modulations and photodetection for nonlinearity.

Main Methods:

• Simulations of a time-delay photonic reservoir.
• Utilizing a Mach-Zehnder interferometer and a microring resonator.
• Incorporating digital memory in the electronic output layer.

Main Results:

• Achieved computation speeds nearly one order of magnitude faster than silicon-nonlinear-based reservoirs.
• Speed is primarily limited by modulation/detection bandwidth, not silicon nonlinearity.
• Demonstrated accurate performance in NARMA-10, Mackey-Glass, and Santa-Fe prediction tasks (NMSE 0.002-0.05).

Conclusions:

• The proposed time-delay photonic reservoir offers a significant speed advantage.
• This architecture enables efficient photonic reservoir computing without relying on silicon's nonlinear effects.
• The system is capable of complex prediction tasks and optical communication signal equalization.