Optical Axons for Electro-Optical Neural Networks

Recently, neuromorphic sensors, which convert analogue signals to spiking frequencies, have been reported for neurorobotics. In bio-inspired systems these sensors are connected to the main neural unit to perform post-processing of the sensor data. The performance of spiking neural networks has been improved using optical synapses, which offer parallel communications between the distanced neural areas but are sensitive to the intensity variations of the optical signal. For systems with several neuromorphic sensors, which are connected optically to the main unit, the use of optical synapses is not an advantage. To address this, in this paper we propose and experimentally verify optical axons with synapses activated optically using digital signals. The synaptic weights are encoded by the energy of the stimuli, which are then optically transmitted independently. We show that the optical intensity fluctuations and link’s misalignment result in delay in activation of the synapses. For the proposed optical axon, we have demonstrated line of sight transmission over a maximum link length of 190 cm with a delay of 8 μs. Furthermore, we show the axon delay as a function of the illuminance using a fitted model for which the root mean square error (RMS) similarity is 0.95.