Using volatile/non-volatile memristor for emulating the short-and long-term adaptation behavior of the biological neurons

Adaptive response to the timely constant stimulus is the common feature of real neurons. The circuit of the adaptive neuron model consumes less power and requires less data transmission bandwidth compared to the circuit of the non-adaptive neuron model, especially for encoding time-varying signals. Memristor is a good candidate for mimicking the behavior of neurons so that the simple memristorbased circuit can directly emulate many specific behaviors of the neurons with low power and low area consumption. In this work, for the first time, we show that as the nonvolatile switching property of the memristor can be useful for representing long-term adaptation behavior in the memristor-based neuron, the short-term adaptation behavior can also be emulated directly using the same memristor-based circuit due to the volatile switching property of the memristor. Here, short term adaptation is realized using the volatile property of memristor, unlike neuron circuits where adaptation is realized using leakage modulation. As a result, in the memristor-based neuron extra power dissipation can be reduced. Two different types of memristors are used for implementing the proposed circuit of adaptive leaky integrate and-fire neuron, the volatile/non-volatile memristor and threshold switching memristor are in the charge and discharge path of the capacitor, respectively. Results show that the volatile or non-volatile resistance change of charging memristor upon different input patterns to the neuron circuit determines the type of adaptive behavior of the neuron response, i.e. the neuron may show short-term adaptation or long-term adaptation or does not show an adaptation behavior at all. Comparison with similar works shows that the energy consumption per spiking of the proposed neuron is relatively low, while the circuit is very area efficient. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.