A novel optical WDM demultiplexer consisting of a simple optical multimode guide and an electrical neural network

The operation of the demultiplexer with two different wavelength signals spaced 3 nm apart at 100 Mb/s is discussed. The wavelength resolution of the demultiplexer depends on the differences between the speckle patterns and the recognition performance of the electrical neural network (E-NN). The differences between the patterns become clearer when the guide is longer and the numerical aperture (NA) is larger. The recognition performance is improved by increasing the number of E-NN elements, which have weighting and thresholding functions.<>