Oxide Interface-Based Polymorphic Electronic Devices for Neuromorphic Computing

TL;DR

This paper introduces oxide-interface electronic devices with multiple functionalities for neuromorphic computing, demonstrating their potential for scalable, energy-efficient AI hardware and complex decision-making tasks.

Contribution

It presents a novel oxide-interface platform enabling programmable polymorphic devices with applications in neuromorphic systems and integrated circuits.

Findings

Demonstrated programmable oxide-interface devices with transistor, memristor, and memcapacitor functionalities.

Implemented reservoir computing and synaptic plasticity using these devices.

Showcased high-level decision-making tasks like patient-monitoring with reconfigurable circuits.

Abstract

Aside from recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) models, specialized AI hardware is crucial to address large volumes of unstructured and dynamic data. Hardware-based AI, built on conventional complementary metal-oxidesemiconductor (CMOS)-technology, faces several critical challenges including scaling limitation of devices [1, 2], separation of computation and memory units [3] and most importantly, overall system energy efficiency [4]. While numerous materials with emergent functionalities have been proposed to overcome these limitations, scalability, reproducibility, and compatibility remain critical obstacles [5, 6]. Here, we demonstrate oxide-interface based polymorphic electronic devices with programmable transistor, memristor, and memcapacitor functionalities by manipulating the quasi-two-dimensional electron gas in LaAlO3/SrTiO3 heterostructures [7, 8] using lateral gates. A circuit utilizing two polymorphic functionalities of transistor and memcapacitor exhibits nonlinearity and short-term memory, enabling implementation in physical reservoir computing. An integrated circuit incorporating transistor and memristor functionalities is utilized for the transition from short- to long-term synaptic plasticity and for logic operations, along with in-situ logic output storage. The same circuit with advanced reconfigurable synaptic logic operations presents high-level multi-input decision-making tasks, such as patient-monitoring in healthcare applications. Our findings pave the way for oxide-based monolithic integrated circuits in a scalable, silicon compatible, energy efficient single platform, advancing both the polymorphic and neuromorphic computings.