Demonstration of Reservoir Computing Using Optoelectronic Oscillators With Direct Laser Modulation

We demonstrate the first experimental investigation on the performance of simplified optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) reservoir computers (RCs) operating on the standard Santa Fe task, comparing our results against numerical simulations. “Simplifying” the OEO by removing the Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) and directly modulating the laser diode with the injected signal is an important step towards operationalizing OEO-based reservoir computing (OEO-RC), as this helps pave the way to chip-scale optical reservoir computers where all the components of the reservoir layer can be included in a single fabricated photonic circuit. Our results show that a simplified OEO-RC can meet or exceed the performance of more computationally complex OEO-RC and similar delayed all-photonic RC on benchmark tests, likely indicating suitability for the architecture to process real-world, complex data.