Output Estimation of Photonic Reservoir Systems Considering Characteristics of Analog MAC Circuits

Photonic reservoir computing (PRC) has attracted considerable attention as an emerging AI accelerator for ultrafast intelligent processing with low power consumption. However, performing all processing optically remains challenging, neces-sitating the support of electrical circuits for post-processing. To address this, we have prototyped an analog multiply-and-accumulate (MAC) circuit designed for the readout process of the reservoir computing. Our results demonstrate that nonlinearity and noise due to the circuit do not significantly affect the PRC system. It suggests analog circuits could be used for readout and actively use this nonlinearity for reservoir computing.