CMOS-Memristor Dendrite Threshold Circuits

TL;DR

This paper presents a hardware circuit design using memristors, Zener diodes, and CMOS gates to implement non-linear dendrite responses, enabling the construction of XOR and intensity detection circuits.

Contribution

It introduces a novel memristor-based circuit design for biologically inspired non-linear dendrite models, addressing the challenge of hardware implementation.

Findings

Successfully designed and verified dendrite circuits on circuit boards.

Demonstrated XOR and intensity detection functionalities.

Showed potential for biologically plausible neural hardware implementations.

Abstract

Non-linear neuron models overcomes the limitations of linear binary models of neurons that have the inability to compute linearly non-separable functions such as XOR. While several biologically plausible models based on dendrite thresholds are reported in the previous studies, the hardware implementation of such non-linear neuron models remain as an open problem. In this paper, we propose a circuit design for implementing logical dendrite non-linearity response of dendrite spike and saturation types. The proposed dendrite cells are used to build XOR circuit and intensity detection circuit that consists of different combinations of dendrite cells with saturating and spiking responses. The dendrite cells are designed using a set of memristors, Zener diodes, and CMOS NOT gates. The circuits are designed, analyzed and verified on circuit boards.