Effect of Plasma Treatment on the Long-term Plasticity of Synaptic Transistor

As the basic and essential unit of neuromorphic computing system, artificial synaptic devices exhibit great potential in accelerating the high-performance parallel computation, artificial intelligence, and adaptive learning. Among them, electrolyte-gated synaptic transistors (EGSTs) have received increasing attention as the next generation neuromorphic devices owing to its controllable channel conductance. The devices exhibit the abilities of simulating the short-term plasticity (STP) and long-term plasticity (LTP) of the neural synapses. However, most of EGSTs exhibit short persistence for LTP and their channel conductance is difficult to be adjusted due to the rapid self-discharge of the electric double layer. In this work, the EGSTs based on water-induced In2O3 as the channel and chitosan as gate electrolyte were constructed and the O-2 plasma treatments were performed. The formation of traps on the channel surface is caused by the O-2 plasma treatments, which leads to capturing hydrogen ions at interface of the electrolyte/channel layer, and the device performance exhibits an enlarged hysteresis window, so as to regulate LTP of EGSTs. Biological synaptic functions, including excitatory postsynaptic current (EPSC), paired-pulse facilitation (PPF), STP, and LTP, were mimicked by electrochemical doping and electrostatic coupling effects. Meanwhile, based on the experimentally verified potentiation/depression characteristics of the EGSTs, a three-layer artificial neural network is applied for handwritten digit recognition, and simulation tests can obtain high recognition accuracy of 94.7%. These results reveal that surface plasma treatment is one of the key technologies to affect the device performance, which has great potential in regulating synaptic function of EGSTs.