Brain-inspired biodegradable pectin based proton conductor gated electronic synapse

Authors：Juan Wen; Li Qiang Zhu; Hong Fang Qi; Zheng Yu Ren; Fang Wang; Hui Xiao

Source：Organic Electronics: physics, materials, applications , 2020, 82: 105782.

DOI：10.1016/j.orgel.2020.105782

• Electric double layer
• Pectin-based electrolyte
• Oxide synaptic transistors
• Spike-rate-dependent plasticity
• BCM rules

Mimicking synaptic activities on solid-state electrolyte gated oxide transistors can lay a concrete foundation for the future of artificial intelligence. Renewable natural materials have the advantages of being abundant, inexpensive, biodegradable and ecologically benign. In the present work, we have proposed a biodegradable pectin electrolyte based proton conductor gated “green” electronic synapse. With the unique proton gating activities, the pectin gated transistor exhibits good electrical performances at low operation voltage. Thus, a low-voltage driven resistor-loaded inverter is fabricated. The devices exhibit neuromorphic functions including excitatory post-synaptic current (EPSC), adjustable synaptic weights and transitions from short-term plasticity (STP) to long-term plasticity (LTP). Interestingly, BCM learning rules have also been mimicked on the proposed synaptic transistor, including spike-rate-dependent plasticity (SRDP) and a sliding frequency threshold (fθ). Bio-realistic implementation of important synaptic plasticities with BCM learning acitivites would improve the efficiency of hardware based neural network for the artificial intelligent system.