Artificial Synaptic Memristors Based on Egg Albumen-Gold Nanoparticle Nanocomposites

Memristors are considered favorable candidate devices for solving the current von Neumann bottleneck due to their integrated storage function, while biomemristors have a unique advantage in brain-like computing due to their environmental friendliness, biodegradability and biocompatibility. Memristors with synaptic plasticity can participate in the construction of neuromorphic computing systems. Here, we fabricated flexible and rigid biomemristors by incorporating egg albumen into gold nanoparticle nanocomposites as active layers. The device exhibited multilevel memory capabilities and excellent bipolar switching characteristics, including high switching-current ratio and retention time, and a stable threshold voltage distribution. The device can achieve brain synaptic potentiation and depression, excitatory postsynaptic current, paired-pulse facilitation, short-term plasticity conversion to long-term plasticity, spike-rate-dependent plasticity, spike-timing-dependent plasticity, learning-forgetting-relearning and other behaviors. The formation and breakage of electron hopping paths composed of oxygen vacancies are the main reasons for the bipolar resistive switching behavior of the memristor. Au NPs act as trapping centers in the active layer, and their Coulomb blocking effect increases the switching current ratio of the device. The low-cost, biofriendly egg-albumen-based active layer, flexible structure, and rich synaptic plasticity endow the memristor with great potential in the fields of neuromorphic computing, nonvolatile storage, and logic circuits.