Nonlinear behavior of memristive devices during tuning process and its impact on STDP learning rule in memristive neural networks

AbstractIt is now widely accepted that memristive devices are promising candidates for the emulation of the behavior 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 for example by the application of voltage or current. In addition, it is also possible to fabricate high density of memristive devices through the nano-crossbar structures. In this paper, we will show that there are some problems associated with memristive devices, which are playing the role of biological synapses. For example, we show that the variation rate of the memristance depends completely on the initial state 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 and cause the corresponding neuromorphic systems to become unstable. We also illustrate that using two serially connected memristive devices with different polarities as a synapse can somewhat fix the aforementioned problem.

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