Biological plausibility and stochasticity in scalable VO2 active memristor neurons

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that nanoscale vanadium dioxide memristor neurons exhibit complex biological-like dynamics and stochasticity, paving the way for scalable, energy-efficient all-memristor neuromorphic computing.

Contribution

It introduces biologically plausible memristor neurons with rich dynamics and stochasticity, surpassing simple integrate-and-fire models and enabling scalable neuromorphic systems.

Findings

Memristor neurons exhibit all three classes of excitability.

They display most known biological neuronal dynamics.

Neurons are intrinsically stochastic.

Abstract

Neuromorphic networks of artificial neurons and synapses can solve computational hard problems with energy efficiencies unattainable for von Neumann architectures. For image processing, silicon neuromorphic processors outperform graphic processing units (GPUs) in energy efficiency by a large margin, but they deliver much lower chip-scale throughput. The performance-efficiency dilemma for silicon processors may not be overcome by Moore's law scaling of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) field-effect transistors. Scalable and biomimetic active memristor neurons and passive memristor synapses form a self-sufficient basis for a transistorless neural network. However, previous demonstrations of memristor neurons only showed simple integrate-and-fire (I&F) behaviors and did not reveal the rich dynamics and computational complexity of biological neurons. Here we show that neurons built with nanoscale vanadium dioxide active memristors possess all three classes of excitability and most of the known biological neuronal dynamics, and are intrinsically stochastic. With the favorable size and power scaling, there is a path toward an all-memristor neuromorphic cortical computer.