Photonic spike processing

## Reading Recent progress in semiconductor excitable lasers for photonic spike processing, http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/AOP.8.000228

### Background

In decades, the region of the transmission of information is ruled by photonics, while the transformation and processing are dominated by electronics separately.

Excitable optoelectronic devices, or excitable semiconductor lasers in particular, are academic trending, because it may potentially enable several unconventional processing approaches beyond traditional binary-logic-based approach. Photonic spike processing, or spike neural network (SNN), also dubbed as photonic neurons, laser neurons or optical neurons, is one of those unconventional procession.

Furthermore, as a neurotrophic architecture, photonics spike processing is a renewed non-von Neumann architecture, which imitating the nature of neurons network. Its aim is to synergistically integrated the underlying physics of photonics with bio-inspired processing.

### Overview.

Funded by DARPA, this article makes a briefing of the implementation of optical neutral network on integrated optical network on chip with excitable laser embedded, or semiconductor excitable lasers. As a beginning, the author reviews current researches on the information processing methods, schemes and applications on semiconductor lasers as a bionic neuron network, which exploits the dynamical analogy between semiconductor photo-carriers and neuron biophysics.

The excitability, a.κ.a spike, is a system property that underlies all-or-none responses to stimulations. Its manifest on integrated optical circuit exhibits a extraordinarily tiny time scale, so it is many orders of magnitude faster than its biological counterpart. Moreover, its specifications of temporal resolution (i.e, spike width) and processing speed (i.e, refractory period) are accelerated by the factor of nearly 100 millions.

### Methodology

- Benefits of Spiking neural network

- Computations are event-driven, operations are sparse.

### Scheme or blue print.

推薦閱讀：