Effects of non-volatility of memristor on the synchronizability of memristor-coupled heterogeneous neurons.

Abstract

Synaptic plasticity is of great significance for understanding the leaning and memory processes in different brain regions since it determines the synchronized firing activities of neurons. A volatility-switchable memristor-coupled heterogeneous neuron model is proposed to explore the effects of the synaptic plasticity on the synchronous dynamics of coupled neurons in different brain regions. With the increment of the non-volatility, the critical coupling strength of synchronization between two heterogeneous neurons decreases in a power-law relationship with the character parameter of the memristor. The critical coupling strength for synchronization of the memristor-coupled heterogeneous neurons under different volatility of the memristor is predicted theoretically with the Lipschitz theorem. The non-volatile memristor is proven to be beneficial to reach synchronization between the memristor-coupled neurons. Finally, a neuron circuit was designed in Power Simulation to observe and validate the influence of non-volatility on system synchronization. The effects of the non-volatility of a memristor efficiently emulate the long-term synaptic plasticity and may contribute to understanding the mechanisms of neuron signal transmission and processing.