All-optical Reservoir Computing

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an all-optical reservoir computer using off-the-shelf components, achieving state-of-the-art performance in optical information processing by leveraging semiconductor optical amplifier nonlinearity.

Contribution

It presents the first all-optical reservoir computing system built with commercial components, showcasing the feasibility of high-performance optical computing.

Findings

Achieved comparable performance to electronic reservoir computers

Utilized semiconductor optical amplifier for nonlinearity

Proved all-optical computing is feasible with current technology

Abstract

Reservoir Computing is a novel computing paradigm which uses a nonlinear recurrent dynamical system to carry out information processing. Recent electronic and optoelectronic Reservoir Computers based on an architecture with a single nonlinear node and a delay loop have shown performance on standardized tasks comparable to state-of-the-art digital implementations. Here we report an all-optical implementation of a Reservoir Computer, made of off-the-shelf components for optical telecommunications. It uses the saturation of a semiconductor optical amplifier as nonlinearity. The present work shows that, within the Reservoir Computing paradigm, all-optical computing with state-of-the-art performance is possible.