Improved Synapse Device With MLC and Conductance Linearity Using Quantized Conduction for Neuromorphic Systems

In this letter, we demonstrate the conductive-bridging RAM (CBRAM) with excellent multi-level cell (MLC) and linear conductance characteristics for an artificial synaptic device of neuromorphic systems. Our findings show that inherent characteristics of CBRAM can achieve the linear conductance and MLC characteristics as a product of an integer unit of the conductance. However, uncontrolled metal-ion injection into the switching layer results in a significant degradation of device uniformity, leading to degradation in the classification accuracy. Thus, we introduce a multi-layer CBRAM configuration (Cu/HfO2/Ta/Cu2S/W) to control the ionic motion in electrolytes. As a result of device engineering, highly improved classification accuracy is achieved using CIFAR-10 data set.