A Single Electron Neuron Device

A neuron device utilizing the single electron tunneling (SET) effect is described. The device consists of four parts: synaptic weight circuits, a multiplier, an adder, and a nonlinear activation function circuit. The synaptic weight memory is designed with only two turnstiles, and the multiplier and the nonlinear activation function are realized with the use of single electron inverter circuits. The total SET transistor count of a neuron with n inputs is only 6n + 2, which is an advantage over a neuron consisting of conventional complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) transistors from the viewpoint of occupation area and consumption power. Due to the smallness of the SET neuron, large systems of artificial neural networks could be realized with the use of these devices.