PWM characteristics of capacitor-free integrate-and-fire neuron

Abstract

An artificial neuron with Schmitt trigger action potential pulsed outputs demonstrating pulse-width modulation capability is presented. One signal processing application of this capability is the mimicking of neuronal burst phenomena without the need for explicitly generating burst trains of individual pulses.

Biomimetic Cortical Nanocircuits

“…Hynna and Boahen report on a circuit that generates a calcium spike with exact replication of waveforms, and describe incorporation of the calcium spike circuit in an entire neuron circuit [25]. Some mixed-signal electronic models close to biological neurons include Liu and Frenzel's spike train neuron [26], Pan's bipolar neuron [27], Wells' research (e.g., [28]), and Chua's cellular neural network (CNN) [19,29]. Chiju et al extends the CNN work and tests their neural model on specific applications [30].…”

Forgetful logic circuits for pulse-mode neural networks

“…The neuron element used is a previously reported design known as a biomimic artificial neuron (BAN) [13], [16]. The first application is the use of a FFF to increase the sensitivity of a neuron to excitatory synaptic inputs.…”

“…The scheme is illustrated in Figure 13. To implement weight modulation, a trivial modification must be made to the standard BAN synaptic input discussed in [13], [16]. In the standard BAN design, a HIGH level input at a synapse switches current to an internal summing resistor at which the voltage input to the BAN's LI is obtained.…”

“…In this paper we present simple circuits for implementing these sorts of elastic modulation features in pulse-mode artificial neural networks and illustrate its use with some examples of rate-and tetanus-duration selectivity in networks comprised of previously reported mixed-signal VLSI pulse-mode neurons [13]- [16]. The circuit is selective for ranges of input firing rates and number of pulses received.…”