Fluxonic Processing of Photonic Synapse Events

Much of the information processing performed by a biological neuron occurs in the dendritic tree. For artificial neural systems using light for communication, it is advantageous to convert signals to the electronic domain at synaptic terminals, so dendritic computation can be performed with electrical circuits. Here, we present circuits based on Josephson junctions and mutual inductors that act as dendrites, processing signals from synapses receiving single-photon communication events with superconducting detectors. We show simulations of circuits performing basic temporal filtering, logical operations, and nonlinear transfer functions. We further show how the synaptic signal from a single photon can fan out locally in the electronic domain to enable the dendrites of the receiving neuron to process a photonic synapse event or pulse train in multiple different ways simultaneously. Such a technique makes efficient use of photons, energy, space, and information.