Universal and reconfigurable logic gates in a noise-triggered artificial neuron node

Submicron-sized mesas of resonant tunneling diodes (RTDs) with split drain contacts have been realized and the current-voltage characteristics have been studied in the bistable regime at room temperature. Dynamically-biased, the RTDs show noise-triggered firing of spike-like signals and can act as reconfigurable universal logic gates for small voltage changes of a few mV at the input branches. These observations are interpreted in terms of a stochastic nonlinear processes in the split RTD, which are found to be robust against noise. The split RTDs show also gain for the fired-signal bursts, can be easily integrated to arrays of multiple inputs and have thus the potential to mimic neuron nodes in nanoelectronic circuits.