Spatiotemporal Information Processing Emulated by Multiterminal Neuro-Transistor Networks

Adv Mater. 2019 May;31(21):e1900903. doi: 10.1002/adma.201900903. Epub 2019 Apr 8.

Abstract

All external sensory stimuli produce a spatiotemporal pattern of action potentials, which is transmitted to the biological neural system to be processed. The relative timing of synaptic spikes from different presynaptic neurons represents the features of the stimuli. A fundamental prerequisite in cortical information processing is the discrimination of different spatiotemporal input sequences. Here, capacitively coupled multiterminal oxide-based neuro-transistors are proposed for spatiotemporal information processing, mimicking the dendritic discriminability of different spatiotemporal input sequences. The experimental results demonstrate that such multiterminal neuromorphic devices can act as spatiotemporal information processing compartments for fundamental cortical computation. Also, as an example of spatiotemporal information processing, sound location functionality of the human brain is also emulated by constructing a simple artificial neural network based on such oxide-based multiterminal neuro-transistors.

Keywords: capacitive coupling; multiterminal neuromorphic devices; spatiotemporal information processing.