An Ultra-Small InP Microdisk Laser Diode for Programmable Non-linear Activation Functions in Neuromorphic Photonics
摘要
The increased demands of Deep Learning (DL) stress electronic computing hardware, prompting researchers in new computing paradigms. Neuromorphic photonic, emerged as a candidate, offering high throughput and energy efficiency, by harnessing light’s advantages. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a Microdisk laser as a programmable all-optical activation function (AF) unit for photonic neural networks (PNNs). The device with a footprint of only 44.2 μm2 produced three non-linear AFs at 2Gbaud i.e., Inverse-ELU, Sigmoid and Clipped-GeLU at input power envelopes as low as 11.5 μW, exhibiting energy efficiency of 1.89 pJ/Symbol.