Neuromuscular Junction Inspired Mechanosensitive hBN-based Memristors for Flexible Neuromorphics

Mechanosensitive neurons in neuromuscular junctions transduce bending into graded changes in synaptic strength, a biological design principle that artificial neuromorphic hardware has yet to exploit. Here, we demonstrate two-terminal mechanosensitive memristor with a vertical Ag/hBN/ITO architecture on flexible PET substrate, where its bending directly and reversibly programs synaptic plasticity through a non-destructive mechanism. Mechanical deformation drives interlayer sliding of the hBN flakes, perturbing the stacking and the inter-flake tunnelling distance without straining lattice.

This programs synaptic plasticity, quantitatively mirroring the amplitude and dynamics co-modulation like in biological mechanosensitive synapses. Conductance states under varying bending conditions also serve as analog synaptic weights in a fully connected neural network trained on the MNIST digit-recognition benchmark, achieving more than 91% classification accuracy across all bending conditions. These results establish interlayer-sliding mediated tunnelling as a new mechanoelectronic design principle for flexible neuromorphic devices whose synaptic state adapts physical interactions with the environment.

Both TP and AK would like to acknowledge the financial support received from Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi-NCR, and Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), India, under the project No. AK would also like to acknowledge the financial support from the DST, India, under the FIST project [SR/FST/PS-I/2017/6(C)]. TP and AK also would like to acknowledge the help received from Dr.

Open access funding provided by Shiv Nadar University. Department of Physics, School of Natural Sciences, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Gautam Buddha Nagar, India University of Queensland Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (UQ-IITD) Research Academy, New Delhi, India Flexible Bioelectronics and Wearables Lab, Department of Electrical Engineering, School of Engineering, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Gautam Buddha Nagar, India The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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