Highly aligned indium zinc oxide nanowire-based artificial synapses with low-energy consumption

Abstract Emulating neural activities at individual synapse level has recently attracted tremendous attention. Here, we demonstrate design and fabrication of the first digitally aligned nanowire (NW)-based three-terminal synaptic transistor. The highly-aligned and individually-position-controlled long continuous indium zinc oxide (IZO) NW arrays were directly printed on a large area with low cost using a special electrohydrodynamic nanowire printing (e-NWP) process. The NWs printed by e-NWP with a diameter of 250 nm emulated the structure of nerve fibers. The device emulates plasticity of biological synapses and showed remarkable advantages in energy consumption compared with previous reports. Unique band-edge modulation along the NW axial direction underlies makes excellent electrical properties of the device. This approach paves the way to easy fabrication of printed-NW-based artificial neural networks.