A Memristor-CMOS Hybrid Circuit for Classical Conditioning Reflex

Abstract

The imitation of classical conditioning reflex at circuit level is a significant procedure to achieve biology-like circuit systems. In order to realize the imitation, the important process are to imitate synaptic behaviors. As an emerging device, the memristor has some excellent properties like nonvolatility, adjustability, nanoscale. Therefore, it is an appropriate candidate to simulate the synaptic behavior in artificial neural network circuits. This paper presents a memristor-CMOS hybrid circuit to imitate classical conditioning reflex of aplysia californica. Besides, the proposed circuit can simulate additional forgetting stages that are activated by the single unconditional stimulus (US) or the single conditioned stimulus (CS) after the learning stage. The learning and forgetting stages can be described as: when US and CS are given to an aplysia californica together, it forms classical conditioning reflex through associative learning. Then, giving US or CS alone to the aplysia californica after the learning, it will forget the classical conditioning reflex gradually. The proposed circuit is simulated on PSPICE to demonstrate the effectiveness.