High performance photonic reservoir computer based on a coherently driven passive cavity

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a high-performance, low-power photonic reservoir computer using a coherently driven passive fiber cavity, showing promising results for analog signal processing in AI and telecommunications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel photonic reservoir computing system based on a passive fiber cavity with a simple analytical model and improved performance over previous optical implementations.

Findings

Error rate comparable or lower than previous experiments

Lower power consumption than prior optical reservoir computers

Effective processing of analog signals across various tasks

Abstract

Reservoir computing is a recent bio-inspired approach for processing time-dependent signals. It has enabled a breakthrough in analog information processing, with several experiments, both electronic and optical, demonstrating state-of-the-art performances for hard tasks such as speech recognition, time series prediction and nonlinear channel equalization. A proof-of-principle experiment using a linear optical circuit on a photonic chip to process digital signals was recently reported. Here we present a photonic implementation of a reservoir computer based on a coherently driven passive fiber cavity processing analog signals. Our experiment has error rate as low or lower than previous experiments on a wide variety of tasks, and also has lower power consumption. Furthermore, the analytical model describing our experiment is also of interest, as it constitutes a very simple high performance reservoir computer algorithm. The present experiment, given its good performances, low energy consumption and conceptual simplicity, confirms the great potential of photonic reservoir computing for information processing applications ranging from artificial intelligence to telecommunications