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Piezoelectric neuron for neuromorphic computing
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  • Wenjie Li,
  • Shan Tan,
  • Zhen Fan,
  • Zhiwei Chen,
  • Jiali Ou,
  • Kun Liu,
  • Ruiqiang Tao,
  • Guo Tian,
  • Minghui Qin,
  • Min Zeng,
  • Xubing Lu,
  • Guofu Zhou,
  • Xingsen Gao,
  • Jun-Ming Liu
Wenjie Li
South China Normal University
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Shan Tan
South China Normal University
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Zhen Fan
South China Normal University

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Zhiwei Chen
South China Normal University
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Jiali Ou
South China Normal University
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Kun Liu
South China Normal University
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Ruiqiang Tao
South China Normal University
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Guo Tian
South China Normal University
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Minghui Qin
South China Normal University
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Min Zeng
South China Normal University
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Xubing Lu
South China Normal University
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Guofu Zhou
South China Normal University
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Xingsen Gao
South China Normal University
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Jun-Ming Liu
Nanjing University
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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.
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