A TaOx-Based Electronic Synapse With High Precision for Neuromorphic Computing

Neuromorphic computing is a promising candidate for breaking the von Neumann bottleneck and developing high-efficient computing systems. Here we present a W/TaOx/Pt high-precision electronic synapse with excellent analog properties for neuromorphic computing. The device exhibits the potential of 10-bit weight precision, which is state of the art in conductance levels. Furthermore, the device shows linear weight update behavior in a specific conductance range, linear I-V curves in low voltage regime, long time retention, and precise modulation of weight. These characteristics are very helpful for improving the accuracy of neuromorphic networks. Finally, a 400 x 60 x 10 three-layer perceptron was constructed with W/TaOx/Pt synapses for MNIST classification and similar to 92% accuracy was achieved.