A Light-Driven Artificial Neural Network Architecture for Deep Neural Network

Abstract

With the aim of making an IoT device more environmentally friendly, we attempted to redesign the physical layer of an IoT device architecture for a deep neural network. A method for making a deep neural network device for inference execution with a plastic optical fiber is proposed. The device comprises sum-of-product arithmetic units driven by light from an external light source and non-linear activation function units. These units are concatenated in line and form a layered network without optical amplifiers.