Tunable flexible artificial synapses: a new path toward a wearable electronic system

Kunlong Yang,Yuxiang Huan,Yiqiang Zhan,Lirong Zheng,Jiao Wang,Jiawei Xu,Fernando Seoane,Sijian Yuan,Li Tu,Zhuo Zou

doi:10.1038/s41528-018-0033-1

Abstract

The flexible electronics has been deemed to be a promising approach to the wearable electronic systems. However, the mismatching between the existing flexible deices and the conventional computing paradigm results an impasse in this field. In this work, a new way to access to this goal is proposed by combining flexible devices and the neuromorphic architecture together. To achieve that, a high-performance flexible artificial synapse is created based on a carefully designed and optimized memristive transistor. The device exhibits high-performance which has near-linear non-volatile resistance change under 10,000 identical pulse signals within the 515% dynamic range, and has the energy consumption as low as 45 fJ per pulse. It also displays multiple synaptic plasticity features, which demonstrates its potential for real-time online learning. Besides, the adaptability by virtue of its three-terminal structure specifically contributes its improved uniformity, repeatability, and reduced power consumption. This work offers a very viable solution for the future wearable computing.

Highlights

The flexible electronics has become a very attractive field
As a proof-of-concept, the artificial neural network has already achieved a success on software level using the and central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) on conventional computers and proved its effectiveness on cognitive computing.[11]
A new approach of wearable electronic system was proposed by combining flexible devices and the neuromorphic system

Summary

Introduction

Tons of flexible devices have been reported during the past decades, with different device structures and materials, working as sensors,[1,2,3] computing blocks,[4] or display units.[5,6] For noncomputing components, the achievements are very satisfactory. Lots of devices step toward practical use, for example, the electronic skins[3,7,8] and the wearable sensors.[1] when it comes to the computing component, the situation is not comforting. There were some demonstrations for flexible circuit[4,9] based on the conventional computing architectures, e.g., von Neumann and Modified Harvard, the functions and performance were very limited and clearly insufficient for processing those numerous less structured[10] information receiving from the environment and the human body. A direct transplant of that way into the flexible computers is hard, the same dilemma still exists because of the unsatisfied flexible device performance

Methods

Results

Conclusion