APPARATUS AND METHODS FOR OPTICAL NEURAL NETWORK

• Main Authors: Soljacic, Marin, Skirlo, Scott A, Harris, Nicholas Christopher, Carolan, Jacques Johannes, Shen, Yichen, Prabhu, Mihika, Englund, Dirk
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 26.09.2019
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTER SYSTEMS BASED ON SPECIFIC COMPUTATIONAL MODELS; COMPUTING; COUNTING; DEVICES OR ARRANGEMENTS, THE OPTICAL OPERATION OF WHICH ISMODIFIED BY CHANGING THE OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE MEDIUM OF THEDEVICES OR ARRANGEMENTS FOR THE CONTROL OF THE INTENSITY,COLOUR, PHASE, POLARISATION OR DIRECTION OF LIGHT, e.g.SWITCHING, GATING, MODULATING OR DEMODULATING; FREQUENCY-CHANGING; NON-LINEAR OPTICS; OPTICAL ANALOGUE/DIGITAL CONVERTERS; OPTICAL COMPUTING DEVICES; OPTICAL LOGIC ELEMENTS; OPTICS; PHYSICS; TECHNIQUES OR PROCEDURES FOR THE OPERATION THEREOF

An optical neural network is constructed based on photonic integrated circuits to perform neuromorphic computing. In the optical neural network, matrix multiplication is implemented using one or more optical interference units, which can apply an arbitrary weighting matrix multiplication to an array of input optical signals. Nonlinear activation is realized by an optical nonlinearity unit, which can be based on nonlinear optical effects, such as saturable absorption. These calculations are implemented optically, thereby resulting in high calculation speeds and low power consumption in the optical neural network.