Dopingless-TFET Leaky-Integrated-Fire (LIF) Neuron For High-Speed Energy Efficient Applications

The silicon based dopingless tunnel field effect transistor (DL-TFET) demonstrates artificial neuromorphic property for leaky-integrate-fire (LIF) neurons characteristics due to impact ionization. Using the calibrated simulations, this research article reports an ultra-high speed and ultra-energy efficient silicon based electrical neuron realization for emulating biological neuron behaviour. The reported DL-TFET exhibits a very low threshold voltage of 0.289 V and minimum energy of 1.5 aJ to fire a spike signal which is very low in comparison to the earlier reported literature. Here, impact ionization is the dominant mechanism for producing spiking behaviour due to induced holes storage in the potential well of DL-TFET. Furthermore, the DL-TFET device working as a LIF neuron reported around 0.6 THz spiking frequency. This work exhibits a significant reduction in energy consumption and overcomes the limitations of analog/digital circuit-based LIF neurons. Hence, DL-TFET based LIF neuron is a potential solution for implementing large-scale spiking neural networks (SNN) because of its compact circuitry and better efficiency.