Reservoir Computing Speeds Up

Light-based (photonic) technologies offer many benefits when it comes to building a computer: they are efficient, have high bandwidths, and deliver fast processing speeds. But progress in photonics-based computing has almost always been outpaced by advances in semiconductor electronics, which make up the logical elements in today’s computers. Where photonics does seem to be making headway is with alternative computation schemes, which solve problems differently than conventional transistor-based (binary) computers. One example of an alternative scheme is reservoir computing, which uses interconnected devices to mimic the neuronal architecture of the brain. Laurent Larger, of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Burgundy Franche-Compté, and co-workers [1] have taken a photonics-based reservoir computer design and refitted part of it with optoelectronic components to achieve a threefold increase in processing speed. Their computer, which is built with standard telecommunication devices, is capable of recognizing one million spoken words per second and lends itself to being integrated into a chip.