Split Additive Manufacturing for Printed Neuromorphic Circuits

Printed and flexible electronics promises smart devices for application domains, such as smart fast moving consumer goods and medical wearables, which are generally untouchable by conventional rigid silicon technologies. This is due to their remarkable properties such as flexibility, non-toxic materials, and having low-cost per area. Combined with neuromorphic computing, printed neuromorphic circuits pose an attractive solution for these application domains. Particularly, the additive printing technologies can reduce large amount of fabrication complexities and costs. On the one hand, high-throughput additive printing processes, such as roll-to-roll printing, can reduce the per-device fabrication time and cost. On the other hand, jet-printing can provide point-of-use customization at the expense of lower fabrication throughput. In this work, we propose a machine learning based design framework, that respects the objective and physical constraints of split additive manufacturing for printed neuromorphic circuits. With the proposed framework, multiple printed neural networks are trained jointly with the aim to sensibly combine multiple fabrication techniques (e.g., roll-to-roll and jet-printing). This should lead to a cost-effective fabrication of multiple different printed neuromorphic circuits and achieve high fabrication throughput, lower cost, and point-of-use customization.