Physical aspects of low power synapses based on phase change memory devices

Abstract

In this work, we demonstrate how phase change memory (PCM) devices can be used to emulate biologically inspired synaptic functions in particular, potentiation and depression, important for implementing neuromorphic hardware. PCM devices with different chalcogenide materials are fabricated and characterized. The asymmetry between the potentiation and depression behaviors of the PCM is stressed. Detailed multi-physical simulations are performed to study the underlying physics of the synaptic behavior of PCM. A versatile behavioral model and a multi-level circuit-compatible model are developed for system and circuit-level neuromorphic simulations. We propose a unique low-power methodology named the 2-PCM Synapse, to use PCM devices as synapses in large scale neuromorphic systems. To show the strength of our proposed solution, we efficiently simulated fully connected feed-forward spiking neural network capable of complex visual pattern extraction from real world data.