Lateral inhibition in magnetic domain wall racetrack arrays for neuromorphic computing

Abstract

Neuromorphic computing captures the quintessential neural behaviors of the brain and is a promising candidate for the beyond-von Neumann computer architectures, featuring low power consumption and high parallelism. The neuronal lateral inhibition feature, closely associated with the biological receptive field, is crucial to neuronal competition in the nervous system as well as its neuromorphic hardware counterpart. The domain wall - magnetic tunnel junction (DW-MTJ) neuron is an emerging spintronic artificial neuron device exhibiting intrinsic lateral inhibition. This work discusses lateral inhibition mechanism of the DW-MTJ neuron and shows by micromagnetic simulation that lateral inhibition is efficiently enhanced by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI).