Al_2O_3-Based Capacitor-Less Conductive-Bridge Neuron Having Negative-Differential-Resistance

摘要

Recently, memristive devices (e.g. CBRAM and ReRAM etc.) have been proposed as an alternative to C-MOSFET based neuromorphic device (i.e. neuron and synapse) to achieve a high neuronal density and low power consumption. Among memristive devices, the conductive bridge neuron has been a great attention due to its area efficiency, low power consumption (< 500 fJ), and good C-MOS compatibility. However, past researches have mainly focused on stochastic nature of conductive-bridge neurons. In particular, most of the stochastic conductive-bridge neuron have used capacitors to implement membrane potential, which requires a large integration area (～1000F~2). In this works, integrate property of Al_2O_3-based cap-less conductive-bridge neuron was demonstrated which allows a cost-efficient neuromorphic chip by using a same process technology as a memristor synapse, as shown in Fig 1 (a). Note that the Al_2O_3-based cap-less conductive-bridge neuron was the same as that of the Al_2O_3-based memristor synapse. In addition, we investigated the effect of negative-differential-resistance (NDR) characteristic on integrate property for our proposed neuron, depending on the compliance current level (i.e. a shape of metallic filaments in neuron device).