Recent Advance in Synaptic Plasticity Modulation Techniques for Neuromorphic Applications.

Highlights: This review delves into the recent progress in high-performance and multifunctional neuromorphic devices for artificial intelligence applications from a novel perspective of plasticity modulation. It provides an in-depth discussion on the plasticity modulation strategies by chemical techniques, device structure design and physical signal modulation for advanced neuromorphic applications. It offers the prospects of exploring novel plasticity modulation mechanisms and techniques for scaled neural networks and examining their potentials in multimodal collaborative neuromorphic systems. Manipulating the expression of synaptic plasticity of neuromorphic devices provides fascinating opportunities to develop hardware platforms for artificial intelligence. However, great efforts have been devoted to exploring biomimetic mechanisms of plasticity simulation in the last few years. Recent progress in various plasticity modulation techniques has pushed the research of synaptic electronics from static plasticity simulation to dynamic plasticity modulation, improving the accuracy of neuromorphic computing and providing strategies for implementing neuromorphic sensing functions. Herein, several fascinating strategies for synaptic plasticity modulation through chemical techniques, device structure design, and physical signal sensing are reviewed. For chemical techniques, the underlying mechanisms for the modification of functional materials were clarified and its effect on the expression of synaptic plasticity was also highlighted. Based on device structure design, the reconfigurable operation of neuromorphic devices was well demonstrated to achieve programmable neuromorphic functions. Besides, integrating the sensory units with neuromorphic processing circuits paved a new way to achieve human-like intelligent perception under the modulation of physical signals such as light, strain, and temperature. Finally, considering that the relevant technology is still in the basic exploration stage, some prospects or development suggestions are put forward to promote the development of neuromorphic devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]