Piezoelectric neuron for neuromorphic computing

Neuromorphic computing has attracted great attention for its massive parallelism and high energy efficiency. As the fundamental components of neuromorphic computing systems, artificial neurons play a key role in information processing. However, the development of artificial neurons that can simultaneously incorporate low hardware overhead, high reliability, high speed, and low energy consumption remains a challenge. To address this challenge, we propose and demonstrate a piezoelectric neuron with a simple circuit structure, consisting of a piezoelectric cantilever, a parallel capacitor, and a series resistor. It operates through the synergy between the converse piezoelectric effect and the capacitive charging/discharging. Thanks to this efficient and robust mechanism, the piezoelectric neuron not only implements critical leaky integrate-and-fire functions (including leaky integration, threshold-driven spiking, all-or-nothing response, refractory period, strength-modulated firing frequency, and spatiotemporal integration), but also demonstrates small cycle-to-cycle and device-to-device variations (∼1.9% and ∼10.0%, respectively), high endurance (1010), high speed (integration/firing: ∼9.6/∼0.4 μs), and low energy consumption (∼13.4 nJ/spike). Furthermore, spiking neural networks based on piezoelectric neurons are constructed, showing capabilities to implement both supervised and unsupervised learning. This study therefore opens up a new way to develop high-performance artificial neurons by using piezoelectrics, which may facilitate the realization of advanced neuromorphic computing systems.