Photonic single perceptron at Giga-OP/s speeds with Kerr microcombs for scalable optical neural networks

Optical artificial neural networks (ONNs) have significant potential for ultra-high computing speed and energy efficiency. We report a novel approach to ONNs that uses integrated Kerr optical microcombs. This approach is programmable and scalable and is capable of reaching ultrahigh speeds. We demonstrate the basic building block ONNs, a single neuron perceptron, by mapping synapses onto 49 wavelengths to achieve an operating speed of 11.9 x 109 operations per second, or GigaOPS, at 8 bits per operation, which equates to 95.2 gigabits/s (Gbps). We test the perceptron on handwritten digit recognition and cancer cell detection, achieving over 90% and 85% accuracy, respectively. By scaling the perceptron to a deep learning network using off the shelf telecom technology we can achieve high throughput operation for matrix multiplication for real-time massive data processing.