Design of Leaky Integrate and Fire Neuron for Spiking Neural Networks Using Trench Bipolar I-MOS

In this article, using calibrated 2-D TCAD simulations we report a trench Bipolar I-MOS for the realization of a spiking neural network. We demonstrated that the proposed trench Bipolar I-MOS LIF neuron can emulate the biological neuronal nature and exhibits a low threshold voltage (−0.16 V), which is ∼|400 mV| lower than the past reported LBIMOS LIF neuron. Moreover, the trench Bipolar I-MOS neuron consumes 0.35 pJ energy per spike, which is ∼100x lower in comparison to the PDSOI LIF neuron. Further, the proposed LIF neuron shows ∼10x reduction in energy per spike than the recently published Ge MOSFET and JLFET based LIF neurons. In addition, the proposed trench Bipolar I-MOS LIF neuron exhibits ∼6 orders high spiking frequency than the biological neuron. Also, the proposed device shows a ∼1.1x reduction in the breakdown voltage as compared to the conventional Bipolar I-MOS. This is due to the crowding of the electric field near the gate edges.