Photonic spiking neural networks with event-driven femtojoule optoelectronic neurons based on Izhikevich-inspired model

Abstract

Photonic spiking neural networks (PSNNs) potentially offer exceptionally high throughput and energy efficiency compared to their electronic neuromorphic counterparts while maintaining their benefits in terms of event-driven computing capability. While state-of-the-art PSNN designs require a continuous laser pump, this paper presents a monolithic optoelectronic PSNN hardware design consisting of an MZI mesh incoherent network and event-driven laser spiking neurons. We designed, prototyped, and experimentally demonstrated this event-driven neuron inspired by the Izhikevich model incorporating both excitatory and inhibitory optical spiking inputs and producing optical spiking outputs accordingly. The optoelectronic neurons consist of two photodetectors for excitatory and inhibitory optical spiking inputs, electrical transistors’ circuits providing spiking nonlinearity, and a laser for optical spiking outputs. Additional inclusion of capacitors and resistors complete the Izhikevich-inspired optoelectronic neurons, which receive excitatory and inhibitory optical spikes as inputs from other optoelectronic neurons. We developed a detailed optoelectronic neuron model in Verilog-A and simulated the circuit-level operation of various cases with excitatory input and inhibitory input signals. The experimental results closely resemble the simulated results and demonstrate how the excitatory inputs trigger the optical spiking outputs while the inhibitory inputs suppress the outputs. The nanoscale neuron designed in our monolithic PSNN utilizes quantum impedance conversion. It shows that estimated 21.09 fJ/spike input can trigger the output from on-chip nanolasers running at a maximum of 10 Gspike/second in the neural network. Utilizing the simulated neuron model, we conducted simulations on MNIST handwritten digits recognition using fully connected (FC) and convolutional neural networks (CNN). The simulation results show 90% accuracy on unsupervised learning and 97% accuracy on a supervised modified FC neural network. The benchmark shows our PSNN can achieve 50 TOP/J energy efficiency, which corresponds to 100 × throughputs and 1000 × energy-efficiency improvements compared to state-of-art electrical neuromorphic hardware such as Loihi and NeuroGrid.