Scandium Nitride as a Gateway III-Nitride Semiconductor for Optoelectronic Artificial Synaptic Devices

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates scandium nitride-based optoelectronic synaptic devices that mimic biological synapses, enabling brain-inspired computing with high speed, low energy, and scalable CMOS-compatible technology.

Contribution

It introduces stable, scalable, and CMOS-compatible scandium nitride synapses exhibiting key biological synaptic functionalities for neuromorphic computing.

Findings

Demonstrated persistent photoconductivity in ScN mimicking synaptic plasticity.

Achieved functionalities like STM, LTM, learning, and logic operations.

Showed frequency-dependent potentiation and depression.

Abstract

Traditional computation based on von Neumann architecture is limited by the time and energy consumption due to data transfer between the storage and the processing units. The von Neumann architecture is also inefficient in solving unstructured, probabilistic, and real-time problems. To address these challenges, a new brain-inspired neuromorphic computational architecture is required. Due to absence of resistance-capacitance (RC) delay, high bandwidth and low power consumption, optoelectronic artificial synaptic devices are highly attractive. Yet stable, scalable, and complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible synapses have not been demonstrated. In this work, persistence in the photoconductivity of undoped and magnesium-doped scandium nitride (ScN) is equated to the inhibitory and excitatory synaptic plasticity of the biological synapses responsible for memory and learning. Primary functionalities of a biological synapse like short-term memory (STM), long-term memory (LTM), the transition from STM-to-LTM, learning and forgetting, frequency-selective optical filtering, frequency-dependent potentiation and depression, Hebbian learning, and logic gate operations are demonstrated.