The Center for Single-Atom Electronics and Photonics, a joint center between ETH Zurich and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), is funded with 12 million Swiss francs by the Werner Siemens-Foundation.
In our recent Nature Communications publication, featured on the Editors' Highlights webpage, we introduce nanoscale memristive devices that combines enhanced synaptic emulation with ultra-low energy consumption. These breakthroughs could improve AI performance and efficiency, with our devices showing a 100x energy reduction compared to GPUs in a neural network playing Atari games.
We have shown that nanometer-scale VO2-based resistive switches uses as little energies as a few femtojoules for switching, outperforming the energy efficiency of individual neurons in the human brain: S. W. Schmid, L. Pósa, T. N. Török, B. Sánta, Z. Pollner, G. Molnár, Y. Horst, J. Volk, J. Leuthold, A. Halbritter and M. Csontos. Picosecond Femtojoule Resistive Switching in Nanoscale VO2 Memristors. ACS Nano, accepted (2024). arXiv:2403.13530.
We have demonstrated the current world record resistive switching speed and multilevel programming in Ta2O5 based memristors. Switching times down to 10 ps could be measured at picosecond resolution: M. Csontos, Y. Horst, N. J. Olalla, U. Koch, I. Shorubalko, A. Halbritter, J. Leuthold, Picosecond Time-Scale Resistive Switching Monitored in Real-Time. Adv. Electron. Mater. 2023, 9, 2201104.
