Memristor Breakthrough: First Single Device To Act Like a Neuron:
"One thing that’s kept engineers from copying the brain’s power efficiency and quirky
computational skill is the lack of an electronic device that can, all on its own, act like a
neuron. It would take a special kind of device to do that, one whose behavior is more
complex than any yet created.
Suhas Kumar of Hewlett Packard Laboratories, R. Stanley Williams now at Texas A&M,
and the late Stanford student Ziwen Wang have invented a device that meets those
requirements. On its own, using a simple DC voltage as the input, the device outputs
not just simple spikes, as some other devices can manage, but the whole array of
neural activity—bursts of spikes, self-sustained oscillations, and other stuff that goes
on in your brain. They described the device last week in Nature.
It combines resistance, capacitance, and what’s called a Mott memristor all in the
same device. Memristors are devices that hold a memory, in the form of resistance, of
the current that has flowed through them. Mott memristors have an added ability in
that they can also reflect a temperature-driven change in resistance. Materials in a
Mott transition go between insulating and conducting according to their temperature.
It’s a property seen since the 1960s, but only recently explored in nanoscale devices."
See:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/...-like-a-neuron