Photoprogrammed Multifunctional Optoelectronic Synaptic Transistor Arrays Based on Photosensitive Polymer‐Sorted Semiconducting Single‐Walled Carbon Nanotubes for Image Recognition

Abstract

Abstract The development of neuromorphic optoelectronic systems opens up the possibility of the next generation of artificial vision. In this work, the novel broadband (from 365 to 940 nm) and multilevel storage optoelectronic synaptic thin‐film transistor (TFT) arrays are reported using the photosensitive conjugated polymer (poly[(9,9‐dioctylfluorenyl‐2,7‐diyl)‐co‐(bithiophene)], F8T2) sorted semiconducting single‐walled carbon nanotubes (sc‐SWCNTs) as channel materials. The broadband synaptic responses are inherited to absorption from both photosensitive F8T2 and sorted sc‐SWCNTs, and the excellent optoelectronic synaptic behaviors with 200 linearly increasing conductance states and long retention time > 103 s are attributed to the superior charge trapping at the AlOx dielectric layer grown by atomic layer deposition. Furthermore, the synaptic TFTs can achieve IOn/IOff ratios up to 106 and optoelectronic synaptic plasticity with the low power consumption (59 aJ per single pulse), which can simulate not only basic biological synaptic functions but also optical write and electrical erase, multilevel storage, and image recognition. Further, a novel Spiking Neural Network algorithm based on hardware characteristics is designed for the recognition task of Caltech 101 dataset and multiple features of the images are successfully extracted with higher accuracy (97.92%) of the recognition task from the multi‐frequency curves of the optoelectronic synaptic devices.

Keywords

• broadband response
• flexible optoelectronic synaptic devices
• multilevel storage
• photosensitive conjugated polymer
• spiking neural network