Emulation and modelling of semiconductor optical amplifier-based all-optical photonic integrated deep neural network with arbitrary depth

Abstract

Abstract We experimentally demonstrate the emulation of scaling of the semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) based integrated all-optical neural network in terms of number of input channels and layer cascade, with chromatic input at the neuron and monochromatic output conversion, obtained by exploiting cross-gain-modulation effect. We propose a noise model for investigating the signal degradation on the signal processing after cascades of SOAs, and we validate it via experimental results. Both experiments and simulations claim that the all-optical neuron (AON), with wavelength conversion as non-linear function, is able to compress noise for noisy optical inputs. This suggests that the use of SOA-based AON with wavelength conversion may allow for building neural networks with arbitrary depth. In fact, an arbitrarily deep neural network, built out of seven-channel input AONs, is shown to guarantee an error minor than 0.1 when operating at input power levels of −20 dBm/channel and with a 6 dB input dynamic range. Then the simulations results, extended to an arbitrary number of input channels and layers, suggest that by cascading and interconnecting multiple of these monolithically integrated AONs, it is possible to build a neural network with 12-inputs/neuron 12 neurons/layer and arbitrary depth scaling, or an 18-inputs/neuron 18-neurons/layer for single layer implementation, to maintain an output error <0.1. Further improvement in height scalability can be obtained by optimizing the input power.