Artificial Synapse Network on Inorganic Proton Conductor for Neuromorphic Systems Applications

The basic units in our brain are neurons and each neuron has more than 1000 synapse connections. Synapse is the basic structure for information transfer in an ever-changing manner, and short-term plasticity allows synapses to perform critical computational functions in neural circuits. Therefore the major challenge for the hardware implementation of neuromorphic computation is to develop artificial synapse. Here, in-plane oxide-based artificial synapse network coupled by proton neurotransmitters are self-assembled on glass substrates at room-temperature. A strong lateral modulation is observed due to the proton migration in the nanogranular phosphorus-doped SiO2 electrolyte films. Functional roles of short-term plasticity, including paired-pulse facilitation, dynamic filtering and spatiotemporally correlated signal processing are mimicked. Such in-plane oxide-based protonic/electronic hybrid synapse network proposed here are interesting for building future neuromorphic systems.