Dynamic resistive switching devices for neuromorphic computing

Neuromorphic systems that can emulate the structure and the operations of biological neural circuits have long been viewed as a promising hardware solution to meet the ever-growing demands of big-data analysis and AI tasks. Recent studies on resistive switching or memristive devices have suggested such devices may form the building blocks of biorealistic neuromorphic systems. In a memristive device, the conductance is determined by a set of internal state variables, allowing the device to exhibit rich dynamics arising from the interplay between different physical processes. Not only can these devices be used for compute-in-memory architectures to tackle the von Neumann bottleneck, the switching dynamics of the devices can also be used to directly process temporal data in a biofaithful fashion. In this review, we analyze the physical mechanisms that govern the dynamic switching behaviors and highlight how these properties can be utilized to efficiently implement synaptic and neuronal functions. Prototype systems that have been used in machine learning and brain-inspired network implementations will be covered, followed with discussions on the challenges for large scale implementations and opportunities for building bio-inspired, highly complex computing systems.