Fabrication and Statistical Analysis of Large-Scale ZnO NW Based Synaptic Transistors

Transistors that can mimic the functionalities of biological synapses have drawn increasing attention and hold great promise for artificial/spiking neural network. Whilst such synaptic transistors have been mainly realised using conventional micro/nanofabrication methods, recently printed electronics has been explored too. Nevertheless, most of the current studies focus on the demonstration of synaptic behaviour from devices, either individually or over a large scale. As a result, there exists a gap in terms of quantitative explanation of the synaptic behaviour in these devices. To this end, this paper presents the fabrication and characterisation of synaptic transistors based on printed ZnO nanowires (NWs). The equations that govern the observed synaptic behaviour have been discussed. Further, statistical correlations have been extracted from the entire transistor arrays which can be used to further simulate the behaviour of ZnO NW based synaptic transistors. In this regard, this work also lays the foundation for the future realisation of large-scale neuromorphic systems based on printed NWs.