Biological nervous systems evolved in nature have marvelous information processing capacities, which have great reference value for modern information technologies. To expand the function of electronic devices with applications in smart health monitoring and treatment, wearable energy-efficient computing, neuroprosthetics, etc., flexible artificial synapses for neuromorphic computing will play a crucial role. Here, carbon nanotube-based ferroelectric synaptic transistors are realized on ultrathin flexible substrates via a low-temperature approach not exceeding 90 °C to grow ferroelectric dielectrics in which the single-pulse, paired-pulse, and repetitive-pulse responses testify to well-mimicked plasticity in artificial synapses. The long-term potentiation and long-term depression processes in the device demonstrate a dynamic range as large as 2000×, and 360 distinguishable conductance states are achieved with a weight increase/decrease nonlinearity of no more than 1 by applying stepped identical pulses. The stability of the device is verified by the almost unchanged performance after the device is kept in ambient conditions without additional passivation for 240 days. An artificial neural network-based simulation is conducted to benchmark the hardware performance of the neuromorphic devices in which a pattern recognition accuracy of 95.24% is achieved.
Keywords: carbon nanotube; ferroelectric; flexible; neuromorphic computing; synaptic transistor.