Abstract
Local activity is the capability of a system to amplify infinitesimal fluctuations in energy. Complex phenomena, including the generation of action potentials in neuronal axon membranes, may never emerge in an open system unless some of its constitutive elements operate in a locally active regime. As a result, the recent discovery of solid-state volatile memory devices, which, biased through appropriate DC sources, may enter a local activity domain, and, most importantly, the associated stable yet excitable sub-domain, referred to as edge of chaos, which is where the seed of complexity is actually planted, is of great appeal to the neuromorphic engineering community. This paper applies fundamentals from the theory of local activity to an accurate model of a niobium oxide volatile resistance switching memory to derive the conditions necessary to bias the device in the local activity regime. This allows to partition the entire design parameter space into three domains, where the threshold switch is locally passive (LP), locally active but unstable, and both locally active and stable, respectively. The final part of the article is devoted to point out the extent by which the response of the volatile memristor to quasi-static excitations may differ from its dynamics under DC stress. Reporting experimental measurements, which validate the theoretical predictions, this work clearly demonstrates how invaluable is non-linear system theory for the acquirement of a comprehensive picture of the dynamics of highly non-linear devices, which is an essential prerequisite for a conscious and systematic approach to the design of robust neuromorphic electronics. Given that, as recently proved, the potassium and sodium ion channels in biological axon membranes are locally active memristors, the physical realization of novel artificial neural networks, capable to reproduce the functionalities of the human brain more closely than state-of-the-art purely CMOS hardware architectures, should not leave aside the adoption of resistance switching memories, which, under the appropriate provision of energy, are capable to amplify the small signal, such as the niobium dioxide micro-scale device from NaMLab, chosen as object of theoretical and experimental study in this work.
Highlights
In recent years, both industry and academia have been devoting efforts toward the exploration of new materials for the fabrication of novel devices, which, combining a number of functionalities within a limited physical volume, may allow the circuit implementation of disruptive computing strategies, allowing to keep the integrated circuit performance (IC) trend predicted by Moore (1965) in the years to come, despite scientists/companies attempting to reduce CMOS transistor dimensions further shall inevitably face a progressive technological/economical failure (Global Foundries Ltd., 2018)
Given that the memory and learning capabilities of biological synapses may be rather accurately captured by nonvolatile memristor models (Chua, 2013), and that potassium and sodium ion channels in biological axon membranes essentially are volatile memristors (Ascoli et al, 2020a), as formulated in 1952 from Hodgkin and Huxley in a seminal paper (Hodgkin and Huxley, 1952), for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1961, and theoretically proved out in 2012 from Chua in a milestone manuscript (Chua et al, 2012), explaining several paradoxes that arose from their erroneous identification as time-varying resistances, we may conclude that resistance switching memories shall definitely play a fundamental role in the development of bio-realistic hardware implementations of the human brain in the incoming years
The basic unit in the neuronal axon membrane may operate in the local activity (LA) domain, and, most remarkably, in its “pearl” subdomain, referred to as edge of chaos (EOC), and hosting the germ of complexity
Summary
Both industry and academia have been devoting efforts toward the exploration of new materials for the fabrication of novel devices, which, combining a number of functionalities within a limited physical volume, may allow the circuit implementation of disruptive computing strategies, allowing to keep the integrated circuit performance (IC) trend predicted by Moore (1965) in the years to come, despite scientists/companies attempting to reduce CMOS transistor dimensions further shall inevitably face a progressive technological/economical failure (Global Foundries Ltd., 2018). In order to study the complex dynamics, which volatile memristors, blessed with the capability to enter the locally active regime, and, most importantly, its sub-regime, known as edge of chaos (EOC) (Mainzer and Chua, 2013), where the seed of complexity is planted, may induce in circuits, which accommodate them, recurring to the foundations of the LA theory (Chua, 2005) is absolutely necessary2 In this regard, the present manuscript employs concepts from the theory of complexity (Mainzer and Chua, 2013) as well as non-linear circuit-centered (Chua, 1987) and system (Ascoli et al, 2019; Corinto et al, 2020) theory-centered methods to analyze an experimentally validated simple yet accurate model of a micro-scale volatile memristor from NaMLab gGmbH (Mähne et al, 2013; Wylezich et al, 2014), allowing us to explain how to stabilize an operating point lying on the negative differential resistance (NDR) region of the device DC current-voltage characteristic, and to draw a comprehensive picture of the possible operating modes of the microstructure.
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