Study of single-electron information-processing circuit mimicking foraging behavior of honeybee swarm

摘要

A new single-electron (SE) circuit mimicking the foraging behavior of a honeybee swarm is proposed. Recently, a "nature-inspired" or "biomimetic" technology has been attracting attention for developing innovative functional systems applying emerging nanoscale devices. In particular, the foraging behavior of honeybees is focused on as an architecture for a SE circuit. Honeybees show two foraging behaviors, namely, a probability search and a "waggle dance" (sharing information). By combining these behaviors, it can be considered that the foraging behavior is a unique information-processing act. For constructing a new system, a SE circuit mimicking the behavior was designed, constructed, and simulated. The SE circuit was constructed by assuming that the information that honeybees share corresponds to the operation of the circuit. The results of the simulation confirmed that the SE circuit mimics the information-sharing behavior of honeybees. Namely, the proposed honeybee-inspired SE circuit can perform functional information processing. (C) 2017 The Japan Society of Applied Physics