Abstract
Neuromorphic computing has attracted great attention for its massive
parallelism and high energy efficiency. As the fundamental components of
neuromorphic computing systems, artificial neurons play a key role in
information processing. However, the development of artificial neurons
that can simultaneously incorporate low hardware overhead, high
reliability, high speed, and low energy consumption remains a challenge.
To address this challenge, we propose and demonstrate a piezoelectric
neuron with a simple circuit structure, consisting of a piezoelectric
cantilever, a parallel capacitor, and a series resistor. It operates
through the synergy between the converse piezoelectric effect and the
capacitive charging/discharging. Thanks to this efficient and robust
mechanism, the piezoelectric neuron not only implements critical leaky
integrate-and-fire functions (including leaky integration,
threshold-driven spiking, all-or-nothing response, refractory period,
strength-modulated firing frequency, and spatiotemporal integration),
but also demonstrates small cycle-to-cycle and device-to-device
variations (~1.9% and ~10.0%,
respectively), high endurance (1010), high speed
(integration/firing: ~9.6/~0.4 μs), and low
energy consumption (~13.4 nJ/spike). Furthermore, spiking
neural networks based on piezoelectric neurons are constructed, showing
capabilities to implement both supervised and unsupervised learning.
This study therefore opens up a new way to develop high-performance
artificial neurons by using piezoelectrics, which may facilitate the
realization of advanced neuromorphic computing systems.