A Flexible Mott Synaptic Transistor for Nociceptor Simulation and Neuromorphic Computing

Abstract

Designing transparent flexible electronics with multi‐biological neuronal functions and superior flexibility is a key step to establish wearable artificial intelligence equipment. Here, a flexible ionic gel‐gated VO2 Mott transistor is developed to simulate the functions of the biological synapse. Short‐term and long‐term plasticity of the synapse are realized by the volatile electrostatic carrier accumulation and nonvolatile proton‐doping modulation, respectively. With the achievement of multi‐essential synaptic functions, an important sensory neuron, nociceptor, is perfectly simulated in our synaptic transistors with all key characteristics of threshold, relaxation, and sensitization. More importantly, this synaptic transistor exhibits high tolerance to the bending deformation, and the cycle‐to‐cycle variations of multi‐conductance states in potentiation and depression properties are maintained within 4%. This superior stability further indicates that our flexible device is suitable for neuromorphic computing. Simulation results demonstrate that high recognition accuracy of handwritten digits (>95%) can be achieved in a convolution neural network built from these synaptic transistors. The transparent and flexible Mott transistor based on electrically‐controlled VO2 metal‐insulator transition is believed to open up alternative approaches to developing highly stable synapses for future flexible neuromorphic systems.

A biopolymer-gated ionotronic junctionless oxide transistor array for spatiotemporal pain-perception emulation in nociceptor network

“…† τ 3 is calculated to be ∼2.89 s, implying that the device realizes desensitization behavior when the time interval is greater than this value. 26,50 Based on the above results, the correlation between the degree of pain sensitization (H) and voltage (U) can be fitted using the model:…”

Bio‐Inspired Photoelectric Artificial Synapse based on Two‐Dimensional Ti3C2Tx MXenes Floating Gate

“…This is also similar to the sensitization behavior of the organism, which is a protective response for the organism to deal with the injury it has suffered. [42,[51][52] After the +5 V pulses erasing process, almost the same energy as the first learning process was required to relearn. This phenomenon demonstrates the symmetrical LTP/D characteristics of the device under the same amplitude of positive/negative pulses, which benefits the machine learning simulation and will be discussed later.…”

“…The solution-processed oxidized MXenes and zinc tin oxide (ZnSnO, ZTO) served as the floating gate-tunneling layer and the n-type channel layer, respectively. Under the electrical pulses applied on gate terminal, the devices successfully mimicked the typical behaviors of biological synapse based on Hebbian rules, such as excitatory postsynaptic current (EPSC)/inhibitory postsynaptic current (IPSC), paired-pulse facilitation (PPF), short-term memory (STM), long-term memory (LTM), learning-forgetting-erasing behavior, and long-term potentiation/depression (LTP/D), etc.. [42] In addition, for the first time, we reported the UVresponsive synaptic properties of the MXenes floating gated transistor (MXFGT) with a metal oxide channel through the stimulus of UV light spikes. It is worth noting that the device in this work can operate under a low energy consumption condition (≈100 fJ), which is very close to the energy consumption of biological synapses (≈10 fJ).…”

Photo-induced non-volatile VO2 phase transition for neuromorphic ultraviolet sensors

“…During the phase transition process, VO 2 exhibits a sharp change of resistance with several orders of magnitude and a pronounced optical switching in the infrared region. Benefitting from this phase transition, VO 2 has been widely exploited in novel electronic and optical applications such as smart windows 17 – 19 , bolometers for infrared detection 20 – 22 , switching devices 23 – 25 , and neuromorphic devices 26 – 28 . In particular, optical control of VO 2 ’s phase transition at room temperature has great potential for investigating the intrinsic physical mechanism and realizing optical modulation devices.…”