Reconfigurable Artificial Synapses with Excitatory and Inhibitory Response Enabled by an Ambipolar Oxide Thin-Film Transistor

A gate-tunable synaptic device controlling dynamically reconfigurable excitatory and inhibitory synaptic responses, which can emulate the fundamental synaptic responses for developing diverse functionalities of the biological nervous system, was developed using ambipolar oxide semiconductor thin-film transistors (TFTs). Since the balanced ambipolarity is significant, a boron-incorporated SnO (SnO:B) oxide semiconductor channel was newly developed to improve the ambipolar charge transports by reducing the subgap defect density, which was reduced to less than 10(17) cm(-3). The ambipolar SnO:B-TFT could be fabricated with a good reproductivity at the maximum process temperature of 250 degrees C and exhibited good TFT performances, such as a nearly zero switching voltage, the saturation mobility of similar to 1.3 cm(2) V-1 s(-1), s-value of similar to 1.1 V decade(-1), and an on/off-current ratio of similar to 8 x 10(3) for the p-channel mode, while similar to 0.14 cm(2) V-1 s(-1), similar to 2.2 V decade(-1) and similar to 1 x 10(3) for n-channel modes, respectively. The ambipolar device imitated potentiation/depression behaviors in both excitatory and inhibitory synaptic responses by using the p- and n-channel transports by tuning a gate bias. The low-power consumptions of <20 and <2 nJ per pulse for the excitatory and inhibitory operations, respectively, were also achieved. The presented device operated under an ambient atmosphere and confirmed a good operation reliability over 5000 pulses and a long-term air environmental stability. The study presents the high potential of an ambipolar oxide-TFT-based synaptic device with a good manufacturability to develop emerging neuromorphic perception and computing hardware for next-generation artificial intelligence systems.