Soliton crystal Kerr microcombs for high-speed, scalable optical neural networks at 10 GigaOPs/s

Abstract

Optical artificial neural networks (ONNs) have significant potential for ultra-high computing speed and energy efficiency. We report a new approach to ONNs based on integrated Kerr micro-combs that is programmable, highly scalable and capable of reaching ultra-high speeds, demonstrating the building block of the ONN, a single neuron perceptron, by mapping synapses onto 49 wavelengths to achieve a single-unit throughput of 11.9 Giga-OPS at 8 bits per OP, or 95.2 Gbps. We test the perceptron on handwritten-digit recognition and cancer-cell detection, achieving over 90% and 85% accuracy, respectively. By scaling the perceptron to a deep learning network using off the shelf telecom technology we can achieve high throughput operation for matrix multiplication for real-time massive data processing.