Artificial synapse based on van der Waals heterostructures with tunable synaptic functions for neuromorphic computing.

Two-dimensional (2D) materials and van der Waals heterostructures have attracted tremendous attention due to their appealing electronic, mechanical and optoelectronic properties, offer the possibility to extend the range of functionalities for diverse potential applications. Here, we fabricate a novel multi-terminal device with dual-gate based on 2D material van der Waals heterostructures. Such a multi-terminal device exhibited excellent nonvolatile multi-level resistance switching performance controlled by the source-drain voltage and back-gate voltage. Based on these features, heterosynaptic plasticity, in which the synaptic weight can be tuned by another modulatory interneuron, has been mimicked. A tunable analog weight update (both on/off ratio and update nonlinearity) of synapse with high speed (20 ns) and low energy (~7.3 fJ) programming has been achieved. These results demonstrate the great potential of the artificial synapse based on van der Waals heterostructures for neuromorphic computing.