Abstract
Imbuing bio-inspired sensory devices with intelligent functions of human sensory organs has been limited by challenges in emulating the preprocessing abilities of sensory organs such as reception, filtering, adaptation, and sensory memory at the device level itself. Merkel cells, which is a part of tactile sensory organs, form synapse-like connections with afferent neuron terminals referred to as Merkel cell-neurite complexes. Here, inspired by structure and intelligent functions of Merkel cell-neurite complexes, we report a flexible, artificial, intrinsic-synaptic tactile sensory organ that mimics synapse-like connections using an organic synaptic transistor with ferroelectric nanocomposite gate dielectric of barium titanate nanoparticles and poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene). Modulation of the post-synaptic current of the device induced by ferroelectric dipole switching due to triboelectric-capacitive coupling under finger touch allowed reception and slow adaptation. Modulation of synaptic weight by varying the nanocomposite composition of gate dielectric layer enabled tuning of filtering and sensory memory functions.
Highlights
Imbuing bio-inspired sensory devices with intelligent functions of human sensory organs has been limited by challenges in emulating the preprocessing abilities of sensory organs such as reception, filtering, adaptation, and sensory memory at the device level itself
By emulating the synapse-like connections of a sensory organ, biomimetic tactile sensors with information preprocessing ability at the device level could be used as intrinsically intelligent devices in future intelligent systems
The tribo-capacitance of the receptive part, which increases in response to pumped electrons, induces a polarization change of the ferroelectric layer, which is analogous to neurotransmitter release from the Merkel cell
Summary
Imbuing bio-inspired sensory devices with intelligent functions of human sensory organs has been limited by challenges in emulating the preprocessing abilities of sensory organs such as reception, filtering, adaptation, and sensory memory at the device level itself. We first fabricated and characterized an Fe-OFET device with BT NP(20 wt%)/P(VDF-TrFE) nanocomposite gate dielectric (thickness of 0.6 μm) and Ni gate electrode on polyimide (PI) substrate using pentacene as organic semiconductor channel to investigate the synaptic properties of the AiS-TSO (Fig. 2a).
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