Experimental demonstration of bandwidth enhancement in photonic time delay reservoir computing

Time delay reservoir computing (TDRC) using semiconductor lasers (SLs) has proven to be a promising photonic analog approach for information processing. One appealing property is that SLs subject to delayed optical feedback and external optical injection, allow tuning the response bandwidth by changing the level of optical injection. Here we use strong optical injection, thereby expanding the SL’s modulation response up to tens of GHz. Performing a nonlinear time series prediction task, we demonstrate experimentally that for appropriate operating conditions, our TDRC system can operate with sampling times as small as 11.72 ps, without sacrificing computational performance.