Tanh discrete estimate for all-opical neural network based on MZI

Abstract

Optical neural networks (ONNs) can process information in parallel and have low energy advantages which researched more and more recently aims to replace the electrical Artificial neural networks (ANN s) solutions. The MZI with Gridnet or FFTnet can realize the convolution calculation is already proved by lots of researches. But the activation functions still have to use the DAC/ ADC to do the photoelectric conversion and then calculated in electronic-based hardware systems. We proposed a discrete estimate scheme for all-optical activation function in this paper. The scheme can give different accurate results with different implementation cost.