A complete photonic integrated neuron for nonlinear all-optical computing.

Abstract

The field of photonic neural networks has experienced substantial growth, driven by its potential to enable ultrafast artificial intelligence inference and address the escalating demand for computing speed and energy efficiency. However, realizing nonlinearity-complete all-optical neurons is still challenging, constraining the performance of photonic neural networks. Here we report a complete photonic integrated neuron (PIN) with spatiotemporal feature learning capabilities and reconfigurable structures for nonlinear all-optical computing. By interleaving the spatiotemporal dimension of photons and leveraging the Kerr effect, PIN performs high-order temporal convolution and all-optical nonlinear activation monolithically on a silicon-nitride photonic chip, achieving neuron completeness of weighted interconnects and nonlinearities. We develop the PIN chip system and demonstrate its remarkable performance in high-accuracy image classification and human motion generation. PIN enables ultrafast spatialtemporal processing with a latency as low as 240 ps, paving the way for advancing machine intelligence into the subnanosecond regime.