A MoS ₂ Hafnium Oxide Based Ferroelectric Encoder for Temporal‐Efficient Spiking Neural Network

Spiking neural network (SNN), where the information is evaluated recurrently through spikes, has manifested significant promises to minimize the energy expenditure in data-intensive machine learning and artificial intelligence.[ 6] Among these applications, the artificial neural encoders are essential to convert the external stimuli to a spiking format that can be subsequently fed to the neural network. Here, we demonstrate a molybdenum disulfide (MoS2 ) hafnium oxide based ferroelectric encoder for temporal-efficient information processing in SNN. The fast domain switching attribute associated with the polycrystalline nature of hafnium oxide based ferroelectric material is exploited for spike encoding, rendering it suitable for realizing biomimetic encoders. Accordingly, a high-performance ferroelectric encoder is achieved, featuring a superior switching efficiency, negligible charge trapping effect, and robust ferroelectric response, which successfully enables a broad dynamic range. Furthermore, a feedforward SNN is simulated to verify the precision of the encoded information from our ferroelectric encoder, in which an average inference accuracy of 95.14% can be achieved using the MNIST dataset for digits classification. Moreover, our ferroelectric encoder manifests prominent resilience against noise injection with an overall prediction accuracy of 94.73% under various Gaussian noise levels, showing practical promises to reduce the computational load for the neural network. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.