Sensors, Vol. 20, Pages 6119: Optical Axons for Electro-Optical Neural Networks

Sensors, Vol. 20, Pages 6119: Optical Axons for Electro-Optical Neural Networks Sensors doi: 10.3390/s20216119 Authors: Mircea Hulea Zabih Ghassemlooy Sujan Rajbhandari Othman Isam Younus Alexandru Barleanu 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 o...
Source: Sensors - Category: Biotechnology Authors: Tags: Article Source Type: research