Photonic Reservoir Computing with Coupled Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers

We propose photonic reservoir computing as a new approach to optical signal processing and it can be used to handle for example large scale pattern recognition. Reservoir computing is a new learning method from the field of machine learning. This has already led to impressive results in software but integrated photonics with its large bandwidth and fast nonlinear effects would be a high-performance hardware platform. Therefore we developed a simulation model which employs a network of coupled Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (SOA) as a reservoir. We show that this kind of photonic reservoir performs even better than classical reservoirs on a benchmark classification task.