A Universal Configuration Framework for Mem-Element-Emulator-Based Bionic Firing Circuits

Bionic firing circuits are beneficial for bionic hardware applications. It is an attractive but challenging task to design a simple bionic firing circuit to generate spiking and bursting behaviors. To hit this aim, this paper newly proposes a universal configuration framework for mem-element-emulator-based bionic firing circuit, which deploys the charge-controlled memcapacitor and voltage-controlled locally active memristor (LAM) to characterize the electrophysiological behaviors of liquid bilayer and ion channels of a neuronal membrane, respectively. The configuration framework only contains one memcapacitor, LAM, DC voltage, and current stimulus. Then, a charge-controlled memcapacitor and an N-type LAM are employed as a case to verify the effectiveness of the configuration framework. Numerical simulations, PSpice circuit simulations, and discrete component-based hardware experiments are performed, which display that the bionic firing circuit can generate abundant spiking and bursting behaviors. One key feature is that the configuration framework can employ different charge-controlled memcapacitors and voltage-controlled LAMs to build more potential bionic firing circuits. To the authors’ knowledge, this configuration framework is extendable and sheds new light on the design of bionic firing circuits.