Strain-mediated multistate skyrmion for neuron devices

Magnetic skyrmions are potential candidates for neuromorphic computing because of their inherent topological stability, low drive current density and nanoscale size. However, an artificial neuron device based on current-driven skyrmion motion cannot satisfy the requirement of energy efficiency and integration density due to hundreds of millions of interconnected neurons and synapses present in the deep networks. Here, we present a compact and energy efficient skyrmion-based artificial neuron consisting of ferromagnetic/heavy metal/ferroelectric layers which uses strain-mediated voltage manipulation of skyrmion states to mimic the Integrate-and-Fire (IF) function of biological neurons. By implementation of a spiking neural network (SNN) based on the proposed skyrmionic neuronal devices, it can achieve a high accuracy of 95.08% on a modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) handwritten digit dataset, as well as a low power consumption of ∼46.8 fJ per epoch per neuron. The present work suggests a novel way to realize energy-efficient and high-density neuromorphic computing.