Thermally Stable Single-Transistor Neuron for Reliable Neuromorphic System

Abstract

A thermally stable single-transistor neuron (1T-neuron) that uses a vertical nanowire Si MOSFET is demonstrated. The concept of a single-transistor latch (STL) in a MOSFET, which is used to mimic neural firing in a biological neuron, is sensitive to the temperature ( T ) because it generally occurs due to impact ionization (I.I.). As an alternative to the thermally sensitive I.I., thermally insensitive band-to-band tunneling (BTBT) is used to enable the STL to function. Neuronal operation with thermal stability is thereby achieved. It is verified in spiking neural network (SNN) simulations that the recognition ability of handwritten digits in the MNIST dataset was not sensitive to T .