Experimental demonstration of bandwidth enhancement in photonic time delay reservoir computing

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates experimentally that using strong optical injection in semiconductor lasers enhances the bandwidth of photonic time delay reservoir computing, enabling high-speed nonlinear time series prediction with very small sampling times.

Contribution

The study introduces a method of bandwidth enhancement in photonic reservoir computing by applying strong optical injection to semiconductor lasers, achieving faster processing capabilities.

Findings

Bandwidth expanded to tens of GHz with strong optical injection

System operates effectively with sampling times as small as 11.72 ps

Maintains computational performance at high bandwidths

Abstract

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.