Mimicking Synapses with Memristors

Date

May 30, 2013

Time

2:30 PM - 3:30 PM

Speaker

Weiran Cai

Affiliation

Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik - TU Dresden

Series

IMB - Seminar

Language

de

Main Topic

Elektro- u. Informationstechnik

Other Topics

Biologie, Physik, Elektro- u. Informationstechnik

Description

The concept of the memristor, the fourth fundamental electrical element, was proposed by L. Chua in 1962 and was found in laboratory late in 2008. It was found that a special type of memristor is able to mimic the behavior of neuronal synapses. In particular, attributed to the long-term memory of weight changes, the memristor can reproduce the spike-timing-dependent-plasticity (STDP) protocol of a synapse, displaying a synaptic change related to the time interval of pre- and post-synaptic spikes. Not limited to that, we found that the memristor with adaptive thresholds can even mimic higher-order behavior of synapses, realizing the well-known suppression principle of Froemke. This type of memristors can actually display both long-term and short-term plasticities in synapses, which are responsible for excitation level and refractory time, respectively. The corresponding dynamical process is governed by a set of ordinary differential equations. Interestingly, we further found that the Froemke’s model and our memristor-like model, based on two completely different mechanisms, are actually equivalent. This work provides a new perspective of looking at synaptic dynamics and is promising for applications, such as constructing artificial neural networks.

Last modified: May 27, 2013, 3:56:19 PM