All-optical, ultrafast energy-efficient ReLU function for nanophotonic neural networks
Gordon H.Y. Li, Ryoto Sekine, Rajveer Nehra, Robert M. Gray, Luis M. Ledezma, Qiushi Guo, Alireza Marandi · Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics · 2022
We introduce and experimentally demonstrate an all-optical ReLU nonlinear activation function based on the strong quadratic nonlinearity of lithium niobate nanophotonic waveguides and achieve a record-breaking energy-time product per activation of 1.2 × 10 − 27 J · s to overcome the nonlinearity bottleneck in photonic neural networks.