Brain-Inspired Photonic Signal Processor for Generating Periodic Patterns and Emulating Chaotic Systems

Reservoir computers have received much attention recently, for state-of-the-art performance on benchmark tasks and very high data rates. Their major drawback has been offline readout, which decouples the output signal from the system. The authors address this issue with a digital readout layer implemented on a fast field-programmable gate array chip, which can compute the output in real time and feed it back into the photonic reservoir. The optoelectronic delay system yields a simple artificial neural network with output feedback, capable of autonomously generating periodic and chaotic time series---a significant step forward.