In this work we numerically analyze a photonic unconventional accelerator based on the four-wave mixing effect in highly nonlinear waveguides. The proposed scheme can act as a fully analogue system for nonlinear signal processing directly in the optical domain. By exploiting the rich Kerr-induced nonlinearities, multiple nonlinear transformations of an input signal can be generated and used for solving complex nonlinear tasks. We first evaluate the performance of our scheme in the Santa-Fe chaotic time-series prediction. The true power of this processor is revealed in the all-optical nonlinearity compensation in an optical communication scenario where we provide results superior to those offered by strong machine learning algorithms with reduced power consumption and computational complexity. Finally, we showcase how the FWM module can be used as a reconfigurable nonlinear activation module being capable of reproducing characteristic functions such as sigmoid or rectified linear unit.

翻译：本文通过数值分析研究了基于高非线性波导中四波混频效应的光子非常规加速器。所提出的方案可直接在光域中作为全模拟系统实现非线性信号处理。通过利用丰富的Kerr诱导非线性，可以生成输入信号的多种非线性变换，并用于解决复杂的非线性任务。我们首先在Santa-Fe混沌时间序列预测中评估了该方案的性能。该处理器的真正优势体现在光通信场景的全光非线性补偿中，我们提供了优于强机器学习算法的结果，同时降低了功耗和计算复杂度。最后，我们展示了FWM模块如何作为可重构非线性激活模块使用，能够复现sigmoid或修正线性单元等特征函数。