Demonstration of Programmable Brain-Inspired Optoelectronic Neuron in Photonic Spiking Neural Network with Neural Heterogeneity

Photonic Spiking Neural Networks (PSNN) composed of the co-integrated CMOS and photonic elements can offer low loss, low power, highly-parallel, and high-throughput computing for brain-inspired neuromorphic systems. In addition, heterogeneity of neuron dynamics can also bring greater diversity and expressivity to brain-inspired networks, potentially allowing for the implementation of complex functions with fewer neurons. In this paper, we design, fabricate, and experimentally demonstrate an optoelectronic spiking neuron that can simultaneously achieve high programmability for heterogeneous biological neural networks and maintain high-speed computing. We demonstrate that our neuron can be programmed to tune four essential parameters of neuron dynamics under 1GSpike/s input spiking pattern signals. A single neuron circuit can be tuned to output three spiking patterns, including chattering behaviors. The PSNN consisting of the optoelectronic spiking neuron and a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) mesh synaptic network achieves 89.3% accuracy on the Iris dataset. Our neuron power consumption is 1.18 pJ/spike output, mainly limited by the power efficiency of the vertical-cavity-lasers, optical coupling efficiency, and the 45 nm CMOS platform used in this experiment, and is predicted to achieve 36.84 fJ/spike output with a 7 nm CMOS platform (e.g. ASAP7) integrated with silicon photonics containing on-chip micron-scale lasers.