In plain words: A ring coated with a heat-sensitive film acts as a spiking neuron: light builds up until the film flips state and fires a pulse, using photons not electricity. Unlike electrical versions, which waste energy switching, it ran on light and could build ultrafast light-based networks.
Abstract · Toward Fast Neural Computing using All-Photonic Phase Change Spiking Neurons
The rapid growth of brain-inspired computing coupled with the inefficiencies in the CMOS implementations of neuromrphic systems has led to intense exploration of efficient hardware implementations of the functional units of the brain, namely, neurons and synapses. However, efforts have largely been invested in implementations in the electrical domain with potential limitations of switching speed, packing density of large integrated systems and interconnect losses. As an alternative, neuromorphic engineering in the photonic domain has recently gained attention. In this work, we demonstrate a purely photonic operation of an Integrate-and-Fire Spiking neuron, based on the phase change dynamics of Ge$_2$Sb$_2$Te$_5$ (GST) embedded on top of a microring resonator, which alleviates the energy constraints of PCMs in electrical domain. We also show that such a neuron can be potentially integrated with on-chip synapses into an all-Photonic Spiking Neural network inferencing framework which promises to be ultrafast and can potentially offer a large operating bandwidth.
Indranil Chakraborty, Gobinda Saha, Abhronil Sengupta, Kaushik Roy
arXiv:1804.00267 · cs.ET · submitted Apr 1, 2018 · updated Aug 28, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · 10 pages, 5 figures, accepted in Nature Scientific Reports