Optical hybrid analog-digital signal processing based on spike processing in neurons

Spike processing is one kind of hybrid analog-digital signal processing, which has the efficiency of analog processing and the robustness to noise of digital processing. When instantiated with optics, a hybrid analog-digital processing primitive has the potential to be scalable, computationally powerful, and have high operation bandwidth. These devices open up a range of processing applications for which electronic processing is too slow. 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. In this paper, we introduce our photonic neuron architecture and 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.