Lightwave neuromorphic signal processing

Spike processing devices for optical computational systems have the potential to be scalable, computationally powerful, and have high operation bandwidth. They open up a range of optical processing applications for which electronic processing is too slow. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of implementing simple photonic neuromorphic circuits, including the auditory localization algorithm of the barn owl, which is useful for LIDAR localization, and the crayfish tail-flip escape response. Our approach is based on a hybrid analog/digital computational primitive that elegantly implements the functionality of an integrate-and-fire neuron using a Ge-doped non-linear optical fiber and off-the-shelf semiconductor devices.