BTBT Based LIF Junctionless FET Neuron With Plausible Mimicking Efficiency

Amid the quest for nanoscale devices to mimic the biological neuronal dynamics, this article demonstrates a SOI Junctionless Field Effect Transistor (JLFET) based leaky integrate and fire (LIF) neuron in sub-20 nm technology. The band-to-band-tunneling (BTBT) mechanism is considered to imitate the leaky-integration behavior. As JLFET has strongly doped channel that supports fully depletion in the OFF state with considerable band overlapping of channel and drain regions that is subsequently allowing the BTBT in lateral direction. Moreover, the proposed device based LIF neuron requires neither metallurgical junction nor back gate bias to induce the floating body to confine the excess carrier. And, it requires only 0.4 V of supply voltage, which is much lower compared to its equivalent bulk FinFET and PD-SOI MOSFET based LIF neurons and it shows a GHz range of spiking frequency i.e.,
$\sim$
8 orders greater than biological neuron. Hence, it presumes that the proposed SOI JLFET based LIF neuron is more suitable for large scale hardware implementation of spiking neural network (SNN) due to its energy and area efficiency comparable with biological neuron along with CMOS compatibility.