A Compact Artificial Spiking Neuron Using a Sharp-Switching FET With Ultra-Low Energy Consumption Down to 0.45 fJ/Spike

Abstract

In this article, we first utilize a zero subthreshold swing and zero impact ionization FET (Z2-FET) as an innovative artificial spiking neuron and demonstrate it with CMOS-compatible technology. Owing to the sharp-switching and hysteresis characteristics of Z2-FET, the artificial neuron successfully emulates the key biological neuronal behaviors based on a single device, including threshold-driven spiking and stimulus strength-modulated frequency response. Furthermore, the firing threshold of the neuron is conveniently tuned by the gate voltage, which is helpful in the application of spiking neural networks (SNN). A preliminary endurance up to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${2}\times {10}^{{8}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> cycles is obtained in the neuron. TCAD simulations further verify the scaling capability of the Z2-FET neuron and its energy consumption is estimated. The results suggest that <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{Z}^{\vphantom {D^{f}}{2}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -FET has great potential for highly compact and energy-efficient artificial spiking neurons.