Reservoir computing can greatly reduce the hardware and
training
costs of recurrent neural networks with temporal data processing.
To implement reservoir computing in a hardware form, physical reservoirs
transforming sequential inputs into a high-dimensional feature space
are necessary. In this work, a physical reservoir with a leaky fin-shaped
field-effect transistor (L-FinFET) is demonstrated by the positive
use of a short-term memory property arising from the absence of an
energy barrier to suppress the tunneling current. Nevertheless, the
L-FinFET reservoir does not lose its multiple memory states. The L-FinFET
reservoir consumes very low power when encoding temporal inputs because
the gate serves as an enabler of the write operation, even in the
off-state, due to its physical insulation from the channel. In addition,
the small footprint area arising from the scalability of the FinFET
due to its multiple-gate structure is advantageous for reducing the
chip size. After the experimental proof of 4-bit reservoir operations
with 16 states for temporal signal processing, handwritten digits
in the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology dataset
are classified by reservoir computing.