Issue 6, 2022

Emulating the short-term plasticity of a biological synapse with a ruthenium complex-based organic mixed ionic–electronic conductor

Abstract

Short-term plasticity (STP) is a phenomenon in the biological brain where the synaptic weight changes depending solely on the presynaptic activity in the biological brain. STP is an essential brain function for processing of short-term temporal information. Implementation of STP as an electronic device requires mimicking the dynamic behavior of calcium-induced neurotransmitters at presynaptic terminals. This study provides an organic mixed ionic–electronic conductor (OMIEC) memristor based on Ru(bpy)3(PF6)2 as an organic active layer to mimic the STP of a biological synapse. The behavior of the neurotransmitters was emulated through the drift and diffusion of mobile ions in the OMIEC active layer. The ion conductivity of the OMIEC memristor was tuned by adding the LiClO4 salt, which affects the short-term memory behavior. Specifically, our OMIEC memristor exhibited a timescale of paired-pulse facilitation decay similar to that of biological synapses with the addition of 2 wt% salt. Furthermore, the device containing 2 wt% LiClO4 showed similar recovery timescales to a biological synapse when 4 + 1 spikes were applied for emulating the short-term synaptic plasticity. Lastly, our OMIEC memristors were employed as the STP component of a SPICE simulation to modulate the spike-timing-dependent synaptic plasticity learning rule by combining with a non-volatile memristor.

Graphical abstract: Emulating the short-term plasticity of a biological synapse with a ruthenium complex-based organic mixed ionic–electronic conductor

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
16 nov 2021
Accepted
09 fev 2022
First published
16 fev 2022
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Mater. Adv., 2022,3, 2827-2837

Emulating the short-term plasticity of a biological synapse with a ruthenium complex-based organic mixed ionic–electronic conductor

S. Shin, D. C. Kang, K. Kim, Y. Jeong, J. Kim, S. Lee, J. Y. Kwak, J. Park, G. W. Hwang, K. Lee, J. K. Park, J. Li and I. Kim, Mater. Adv., 2022, 3, 2827 DOI: 10.1039/D1MA01078F

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements