Optical Thresholding and Max Operation

Abstract

Thresholding and Max operations are essential elements in the implementation of neural networks. Although there have been several optical implementations of neural networks, the thresholding functions are performed electronically [1-3]. Optical thresholding and Max operations have the advantages of parallelism and cascadability without resorting to optoelectronic conversion. Unfortunately, there has been very limited work in this area. In this paper, we propose and study the properties of self-oscillation in nonlinear optical (NLO) four-wave mixing (FWM) and NLO resonators for parallel optical thresholding and Max operations.