Spiking in memristor networks

Abstract

Memristors have been suggested for the use as artificial synapses and have performed well in this role in simulations with artificial spiking neurons. We will show that real world memristors natively spike and describe the properties of these spikes. A network of purely memristors should not show any behaviour in addition to that expected from a single memristor. Networks of 2 and 3 memristor combinations were investigated. We demonstrate that, if the memristors are wired together with opposing polarity, oscillations and bursting spikes emerge. We compare two types of memristors, ‘filamentary’ and standard memristors (which are closer to Chua’s theoretical memristors), and found that standard memristors do not exhibit these rich behaviours if they are wired with the same polarity. We propose that these oscillations and spikes may be similar phenomenon to brainwaves and neural spike trains and suggest that these behaviours can be used to perform brain-like computation.