Design of a monolithic silicon-on-insulator resonator spiking neuron

Increasingly, artificial intelligent systems look to neuromorphic photonics for its speed and its low loss, high bandwidth interconnects. Silicon photonics has shown promise to enable the creation of large scale neural networks. Here, we propose a monolithic silicon opto-electronic resonator spiking neuron. Existing designs of photonic spiking neurons have difficulty scaling due to their dependence on certain nonlinear effects, materials, and devices. The design discussed here uses optical feedback from the transmission of a continuously pumped microring PN modulator to achieve excitable dynamics. It is cascadable, capable of operating at GHz speeds, and compatible with wavelength-division multiplexing schemes for linear weighting. It is a Class 2 excitable device via a subcritical Hopf bifurcation constructed from devices commonly found in many silicon photonic chip foundries. Silicon photonics can be used to create high-speed large-scale neuromorphic systems for artificial intelligent tasks. Here, the authors discuss the design details and behavior of a resonator spiking neuron that can be fabricated in a commercial silicon photonics foundry process.