Bottleneck of using single memristor as a synapse and its solution

Abstract

It is now widely accepted that memristive devices are perfect candidates for the emulation of biological synapses in neuromorphic systems. This is mainly because of the fact that like the strength of synapse, memristance of the memristive device can be tuned actively (e.g., by the application of volt- age or current). In addition, it is also possible to fabricate very high density of memristive devices (comparable to the number of synapses in real biological system) through the nano-crossbar structures. However, in this paper we will show that there are some problems associated with memristive synapses (memristive devices which are playing the role of biological synapses). For example, we show that the variation rate of the memristance of memristive device depends completely on the current memristance of the device and therefore it can change significantly with time during the learning phase. This phenomenon can degrade the performance of learning methods like Spike Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP) and cause the corresponding neuromorphic systems to become unstable. Finally, at the end of this paper, we illustrate that using two serially connected memristive devices with different polarities as a synapse can somewhat fix the aforementioned problem.