Micro ring resonators as building blocks for an all-optical high-speed reservoir-computing bit-pattern-recognition system

Abstract

In this paper, an alternative approach for an integrated photonic reservoir computer is presented. The fundamental building block of the reservoir is based on the nonlinear response of a ring resonator, where effects such as two-photon absorption and nonlinear refractive index variation were taken into consideration. In order to investigate the validity of this scheme, the response of a single add/drop micro ring was simulated through a traveling wave numerical model, and the parameters that affect the nonlinearity of the response were identified. Based on these results, a 5×5 matrix of randomly interconnected resonators was utilized in order to classify different high-bit-rate digital patterns. Simulations confirmed that the proposed system could offer a classification error of 0.5% for bit rates up to 160 Gbps and for 8-bit-length digital words.