Computer hardware

Engineering

Spike (software development)

Operating system

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser

Computer science

Photonics

Laser

Physics

Optics

Neuromorphic engineering

Electronic engineering

Artificial intelligence

Software engineering

Artificial neural network

Optoelectronics

Encoder

APL Photonics

Driven by the increasing significance of artificial intelligence, the field of neuromorphic (brain-inspired) photonics is attracting increasing interest, promising new, high-speed, and energy-efficient computing hardware for key applications in information processing and computer vision. Widely available photonic devices, such as vertical-cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs), offer highly desirable properties for photonic implementations of neuromorphic systems, such as high-speed and low energy operation, neuron-like dynamical responses, and ease of integration into chip-scale systems. Here, we experimentally demonstrate encoding of digital image data into continuous, rate-coded, up to GHz-speed optical spike trains with a VCSEL-based photonic spiking neuron. Moreover, our solution makes use of off-the-shelf fiber-optic components with operation at telecom wavelengths, therefore making the system compatible with current optical network and data center technologies. This VCSEL-based spiking encoder paves the way toward optical spike-based data processing and ultrafast neuromorphic vision systems.

Neuromorphic encoding of image pixel data into rate-coded optical spike trains with a photonic VCSEL-neuron