Fast Spiking of a Mott VO2-Carbon Nanotube Composite Device. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • The recent surge of interest in brain-inspired computing and power-efficient electronics has dramatically bolstered development of computation and communication using neuron-like spiking signals. Devices that can produce rapid and energy-efficient spiking could significantly advance these applications. Here we demonstrate direct current or voltage-driven periodic spiking with sub-20 ns pulse widths from a single device composed of a thin VO2 film with a metallic carbon nanotube as a nanoscale heater, without using an external capacitor. Compared with VO2-only devices, adding the nanotube heater dramatically decreases the transient duration and pulse energy, and increases the spiking frequency, by up to 3 orders of magnitude. This is caused by heating and cooling of the VO2 across its insulator-metal transition being localized to a nanoscale conduction channel in an otherwise bulk medium. This result provides an important component of energy-efficient neuromorphic computing systems and a lithography-free technique for energy-scaling of electronic devices that operate via bulk mechanisms.

published proceedings

  • Nano Lett

altmetric score

  • 0.5

author list (cited authors)

  • Bohaichuk, S. M., Kumar, S., Pitner, G., McClellan, C. J., Jeong, J., Samant, M. G., ... Pop, E.

citation count

  • 41

complete list of authors

  • Bohaichuk, Stephanie M||Kumar, Suhas||Pitner, Greg||McClellan, Connor J||Jeong, Jaewoo||Samant, Mahesh G||Wong, H-S Philip||Parkin, Stuart SP||Williams, R Stanley||Pop, Eric

publication date

  • October 2019