Weight Adjustable Photonic Synapse by Nonlinear Gain in a Vertical Cavity Semiconductor Optical Amplifier


Abstract: "In this paper, we report a high-speed and tunable photonic synaptic element based on a vertical cavity semiconductor optical amplifier (VCSOA) operating with short (150 ps-long) and low-energy (μW peak power) light pulses. By exploiting nonlinear gain properties of VCSOAs when subject to external optical injection, our system permits full weight tunability of sub-ns input light p... » read more