Bio-inspired compact cell circuit for reaction-diffusion systems

A bio-inspired MOS cell design for reaction-diffusion systems with corresponding single-layer cellular neural network (CNN) implementation is presented. The resulting network layer is introduced and approximate theoretical analysis of its certain dc characteristics is given. A test chip which includes a two-dimensional array of 10 /spl times/ 9 cells is fabricated. The test chip also houses stand-alone modified cells which employ thick-oxide poly2 gate MOSFETs where the inherent high threshold characteristic is used for the design. Both the cell circuit design and the resulting network are very compact and easily implementable with available technologies. The network layer is capable of trigger wave propagation and can also be used as a compact building block for more general and multilayer reaction-diffusion (RD)-CNN designs. The wave propagation across the network and nonlinear I-V characteristics of the separate cells with thick-oxide MOSFETs are demonstrated via measurement results.