Metaplastic and energy-efficient biocompatible graphene artificial synaptic transistors for enhanced accuracy neuromorphic computing

Abstract

CMOS-based computing systems that employ the von Neumann architecture are relatively limited when it comes to parallel data storage and processing. In contrast, the human brain is a living computational signal processing unit that operates with extreme parallelism and energy efficiency. Although numerous neuromorphic electronic devices have emerged in the last decade, most of them are rigid or contain materials that are toxic to biological systems. In this work, we report on biocompatible bilayer graphene-based artificial synaptic transistors (BLAST) capable of mimicking synaptic behavior. The BLAST devices leverage a dry ion-selective membrane, enabling long-term potentiation, with ~50 aJ/µm2 switching energy efficiency, at least an order of magnitude lower than previous reports on two-dimensional material-based artificial synapses. The devices show unique metaplasticity, a useful feature for generalizable deep neural networks, and we demonstrate that metaplastic BLASTs outperform ideal linear synapses in classic image classification tasks. With switching energy well below the 1 fJ energy estimated per biological synapse, the proposed devices are powerful candidates for bio-interfaced online learning, bridging the gap between artificial and biological neural networks.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jul 28, 2022
Source ID
10.1038/s41467-022-32078-6

Entities

People

  • Christopher H. Bennett
  • Deji Akinwande
  • Dmitry Kireev
  • Harrison Jin
  • Jean Anne Currivan Incorvia
  • Samuel Liu
  • T Patrick Xiao

Organizations

  • Division of Computing and Communication Foundations
  • Division of Materials Research
  • National Science Foundation
  • National Science Foundation Directorate for Mathematical & Physical Sciences
  • Office of Naval Research

Tags

Readers

  • Integrated Circuit Design and Technology.
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.
  • Neuroscience

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks
  • Microelectronics