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Neuromorphic computing has recently emerged as a promising paradigm to overcome the von-Neumann bottleneck and enable orders of magnitude improvement in bandwidth and energy efficiency. However, existing complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) digital devices, the building block of our computing system, are fundamentally different from the analog synapses, the building block of the biological neural network—rendering the hardware implementation of the artificial neural networks (ANNs) not scalable in terms of area and power, with existing CMOS devices. In addition, the spatiotemporal dynamic, a crucial component for cognitive functions in the neural network, has been difficult to replicate with CMOS devices. Here, we present the first topological insulator (TI) based electrochemical synapse with programmable spatiotemporal dynamics, where long-term and short-term plasticity in the TI synapse are achieved through the charge transfer doping and ionic gating effects, respectively. We also demonstrate basic neuronal functions such as potentiation/depression and paired-pulse facilitation with high precision (>500 states per device), as well as a linear and symmetric weight update. We envision that the dynamic TI synapse, which shows promising scaling potential in terms of energy and speed, can lead to the hardware acceleration of truly neurorealistic ANNs with superior cognitive capabilities and excellent energy efficiency.
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Short-Term Long-Term Compute-In-Memory Architecture: A Hybrid Spin/CMOS Approach Supporting Intrinsic Consolidation
Biological memory structures impart enormous retention capacity while automatically providing vital functions for chronological information management and update resolution of domain and episodic knowledge. A crucial requirement for hardware realization of such cortical operations found in biology is to first design both Short-Term Memory (STM) and Long-Term Memory (LTM). Herein, these memory features are realized via a beyond-CMOS based learning approach derived from the repeated input information and retrieval of the encoded data. We first propose a new binary STM-LTM architecture with composite synapse of Spin Hall Effect-driven Magnetic Tunnel Junction (SHE-MTJ) and capacitive memory bit-cell to mimic the behavior of biological synapses. This STM-LTM platform realizes the memory potentiation through a continual update process using STM-to-LTM transfer, which is applied to Neural Networks based on the established capacitive crossbar. We then propose a hardware-enabled and customized STM-LTM transition algorithm for the platform considering the real hardware parameters. We validate the functionality of the design using SPICE simulations that show the proposed synapse has the potential of reaching ~30.2pJ energy consumption for STM-to-LTM transfer and 65pJ during STM programming. We further analyze the correlation between energy, array size, and STM-to-LTM threshold utilizing the MNIST dataset.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1739635
- PAR ID:
- 10163066
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Journal on Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits
- ISSN:
- 2329-9231
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 1
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/JXCDC.2020.2983450
