Abstract

A spiking laser can be viewed as a neuron only in the context of a network. The configurable analog connection strengths between neurons, called weights, are as important to the task of network processing as the dynamical behavior of individual elements. Advances in integrated photonics, while intended for digital applications, could open the door for large-scale analog photonic systems, including weighted networks of dynamical laser neurons. Tait et al. [1] recently proposed an optical neural networking scheme called broadcast-and-weight that uses wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM).