Cooperative-Memory Photonic Reservoir using Modulation Nonlinearity: Circumventing the Speed Constraints of Nonlinear Silicon Microring Resonators

Complex dynamics of silicon microring resonators loaded by delayed feedback elements enable high-speed photonic reservoir computing. Implementing feedback is especially challenging when the required delay should match the time scales of silicon’s nonlinearities. To increase the computation speed and preclude any need for very long delay lines, we avoid relying on silicon’s nonlinearity and merely employ either amplitude or phase modulation along with direct detection. By supplementing its memory with that of the electronic output layer, the proposed photonic reservoir composed of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer and a microring resonator is predicted to perform computations one order of magnitude faster than those based on silicon’s nonlinearity with its speed only limited by the modulation/detection bandwidth. This reservoir performs accurately in NARMA-10, Mackey-Glass, and Santa-Fe prediction tasks, and enables signal equalization in optical communication systems.