Complementary oxide memristor technology facilitating both inhibitory and excitatory synapses for potential neuromorphic computing applications

A new family of crystalline oxides is identified that provide a method of producing complementary memristance (both n and p-type having been demonstrated) with unusually large demonstrated memristance behavior. To the best of our knowledge, these are the only devices having a large enough memristance to have measureable memristance at the macroscopic (10's to 100's of um device size) scale. Additionally, the oxides are highly conducting (low loss) with resistivities for both n and p-type variants in the -5E-4 ohm-cm range. Complementary oxide memristors (both n-type and p-type) have been demonstrated in the same material contrasting all other known memristor technologies which are unipolar. Such behavior could be useful in future neuromorphic computing since n-type material exhibits inhibitory synaptic response (increasing resistance with time/voltage) while p-type material exhibits excitatory synaptic response (decreasing resistance with time/voltage). In principle (not yet demonstrated) this core complementary technology can fully implement neuron/synapse brain function without the need for traditional CMOS.