Neuromorphic computing utilizes the computing method of the human brain to providesolutions to artificial intelligence. Developing Neuromorphic computing hardware is
crucial to closely emulate how the human brain works. Spiking neural networks (SNN) is
a kind of neuromorphic computing that provides a new computational paradigm capable
of highly parallelized, real-time processing. Photonic spiking neural networks (PSNNs)
potentially offer exceptionally low loss, low power, highly parallel, and high throughput
compared to their electronic neuromorphic counterparts while maintaining their benefits
in terms of event-driven computing capability.
This thesis presents PSNN hardware utilizing monolithic silicon photonics (SiPh) process
designs which consist of a Mach-Zehnder Interferometric (MZI) mesh incoherent
network and event-driven laser optoelectronic spiking neurons. The Izhikevich-inspired
optoelectronic spiking neuron consists of two photodetectors for excitatory and inhibitory
optical spiking inputs, electrical transistors’ circuits providing spiking nonlinearity, and a
laser for optical spiking outputs.
There are two designs of optoelectronic spiking neurons demonstrated in the Section
2 and Section 3, respectively. One design focusing on the pursuit of energy efficiency
(energy-efficient neuron) and another one focusing on the heterogeneity of neuron dynamics
(heterogeneous neuron). Both event-driven neuron designs are inspired by the
Izhikevich model incorporating both excitatory and inhibitory optical spiking inputs and
producing optical spiking outputs accordingly. The neuron models are verified in Verilog-
A and simulated the circuit-level operation of various cases with excitatory input and
inhibitory input signals. The experimental results closely resemble the simulated results
and demonstrate how the excitatory inputs trigger the optical spiking outputs while the
inhibitory inputs suppress the outputs.
Section 4 demonstrated a variation of the Random Backpropagation (RPB) learning
algorithm on the MZI mesh synaptic interconnects and matched the performance of a
standard linear regression on a simple classification task. The MZI mesh synaptic interconnects
also connected with the heterogeneous neuron design in Section 3 to show the
result of 89.3% accuracy on Iris image classification. The scenarios of multi-layer PSNN
hardware packaging are also presented for future large-scale neuromorphic computing
hardware.
Section 5 presents the future direction for both energy-efficient neuron and heterogeneous
neuron, which implemented with advanced transistor technology and show the
benchmarking results. The nano energy-efficient neuron can achieve an estimated 21.09
fJ/spike input that can trigger the output from on-chip nanolasers running at a maximum
of 10 Gspike/second in the neural network. Utilizing the simulated neuron model,
the simulation results show 90% accuracy on unsupervised learning and 97% accuracy
on a supervised modified FC neural network. The benchmark shows the PSNN design
can achieve 50 TOP/J energy efficiency, which corresponds to 100x throughputs and
1000x energy-efficiency improvements compared to state-of-the-art electrical neuromorphic
hardware such as Loihi and NeuroGrid. The nano heterogeneous neuron has power
consumption of 1.18 pJ/spike output, 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.