A biologically inspired artificial neuron with intrinsic plasticity based on monolayer molybdenum disulfide

Neuromorphic hardware that accurately simulates diverse neuronal behaviours could be of use in the development of edge intelligence. Hardware that incorporates synaptic plasticity—adaptive changes that strengthen or weaken synaptic connections—has been explored, but mimicking the full spectrum of learning and memory processes requires the interplay of multiple plasticity mechanisms including intrinsic plasticity. Here we show that an integrate-and-fire neuron can be created by combining a dynamic random-access memory and an inverter that are based on wafer-scale monolayer molybdenum disulfide films. In the system, the voltage in the dynamic random-access memory capacitor—that is, the neuronal membrane potential—can be modulated to emulate intrinsic plasticity. The module can also emulate the photopic and scotopic adaptation of the human visual system by dynamically adjusting its light sensitivity. We fabricate a 3 × 3 photoreceptor neuron array and demonstrate light coding and visual adaptation. We also use the neuron module to simulate a bioinspired neural network model for image recognition. An integrate-and-fire artificial neuron combining a dynamic random-access memory and an inverter based on wafer-scale monolayer molybdenum disulfide films can emulate intrinsic plasticity, the photopic and scotopic adaptation of the human visual system, and achieve temporal information encoding.