Effect of noise in an optoelectronic neural network

The performance of electronic neural networks will eventually be limited by the capacity of their interconnections as operating speeds are increased. The use of optical connections to link electronic elements offers a way to overcome this problem. In particular, spatial optics techniques are especially suited to neural systems because of their parallel structure. Noise limits to the size and speed of optoelectronic neural networks are presented. The pattern recognition performance of an optoelectronic network was modelled and experimentally measured with patterns presented in parallel at 8.448 MHz.