An energy-efficient tunable threshold spiking neuron with excitatory and inhibitory function

In this work, a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) based leaky-integrate and fire neuron has been proposed and investigated for neuromorphic applications. The neuron has been designed in Cadence Virtuoso and validated experimentally. It has been observed that the neuron consumes a maximum energy of 68.87 fJ/spike. The response of the neuron to excitatory as well as inhibitory inputs has been studied. To verify the applicability, the proposed neuron has been explored for reconfigurable threshold logic to implement various linearly separable Boolean functions including OR, AND, NOT, NOR, and NAND. Moreover, the threshold tunability of the neuron has also been verified and this property has been exploited to design threshold-controlled logic gates. Instead of adjusting the weights of the applied inputs, the functionality of such gates can be controlled by changing the threshold of the neuron, simplifying the synaptic architecture of a neural network. Finally, a multilayer network has been designed and the recognition ability of the proposed network for MNIST handwritten digits has been verified with an accuracy of 96.93%.