Programmable low-power consumption all-optical nonlinear activation functions using a micro-ring resonator with phase-change materials.

A programmable hardware implementation of all-optical nonlinear activation functions for different scenarios and applications in all-optical neural networks is essential. We demonstrate a programmable, low-loss all-optical activation function device based on a silicon micro-ring resonator loaded with phase change materials. Four different nonlinear activation functions of Relu, ELU, Softplus and radial basis functions are implemented for incident signal light of the same wavelength. The maximum power consumption required to switch between the four different nonlinear activation functions in calculation is only 1.748 nJ. The simulation of classification of hand-written digit images also shows that they can perform well as alternative nonlinear activation functions. The device we design can serve as nonlinear units in photonic neural networks, while its nonlinear transfer function can be flexibly programmed to optimize the performance of different neuromorphic tasks.