Demonstration of an UltraLow Energy PD-SOI FinFET Based LIF Neuron for SNN

Abstract

In this article, partially depleted silicon on insulator (PD-SOI) FinFET based LIF neuron is demonstrated to mimic biological neuronal behaviour with aid of well-calibrated 3D TCAD simulation. The floating body effect of PD-SOI FinFET is used to store the holes generated by the impact ionisation (&#x2018;II&#x2019;), which exhibits the integration phenomenon and recombination manifests the leaky function. It shows 5.4 fJ of energy per spike, which is significantly lower than other FinFET based neurons reported till date. Moreover, it needs only 1.8 V of supply voltage, which is lower as compared to its equivalent bulk FinFET and PD-SOI MOSFET based LIF neurons. The proposed PD-SOI FinFET LIF neuron shows megahertz range of spiking frequency, that is <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim 10 ^{5}$</tex-math></inline-formula>&#x00D7; higher than biological neuron (<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim$</tex-math></inline-formula>1-10 Hz). Furthermore, the effective area of the FinFET is optimized as 0.023 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu$</tex-math></inline-formula>m<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$ ^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula>. Thus, the proposed PD-SOI FinFET based LIF neuron is more attractive for large scale hardware implementation of SNN, due to its energy and area efficiency comparable with biological neuron along with CMOS compatibility.