title: Organic core-sheath nanowire artificial synapses with femtojoule energy consumption.
abstract: Emulation of biological synapses is an important step toward construction of large-scale brain-inspired electronics. Despite remarkable progress in emulating synaptic functions, current synaptic devices still consume energy that is orders of magnitude greater than do biological synapses (~10 fJ per synaptic event). Reduction of energy consumption of artificial synapses remains a difficult challenge. We report organic nanowire (ONW) synaptic transistors (STs) that emulate the important working principles of a biological synapse. The ONWs emulate the morphology of nerve fibers. With a core-sheath-structured ONW active channel and a well-confined 300-nm channel length obtained using ONW lithography, ~1.23 fJ per synaptic event for individual ONW was attained, which rivals that of biological synapses. The ONW STs provide a significant step toward realizing low-energy-consuming artificial intelligent electronics and open new approaches to assembling soft neuromorphic systems with nanometer feature size.
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Pohang 790-784, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Wentao
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Pohang 790-784, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Sung-Yong
authors.initials: SY
authors.lastname: Min
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Pohang 790-784, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Hyunsang
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-1930-1914
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Hwang
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Pohang 790-784, Republic of Korea.; Department of Chemical Engineering, Division of Advanced Materials Science, School of Environmental Science and Engineering, POSTECH, 77 Cheongam-Ro, Nam-Gu, Pohang 790-784, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Tae-Woo
authors.initials: TW
authors.lastname: Lee
mesh_terms: D054351:Electrical Synapses; D004581:Electronics / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods; D008959:Models, Neurological; D036103:Nanotechnology; D053770:Nanowires; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D009473:Neuronal Plasticity; D014173:Transistors, Electronic
keywords: artificial synapse; bio-inspired electronics; energy consumption; long-term plasticity; organic electronics; organic nanowire; short-term plasticity