This is getting out of hand. At LanzaLab they try to emulate the behavior of neuron synapses using multilayered hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) . An interesting paradigm states that a biologically inspired computing architecture, will overcome the energy and efficiency limitations of classic computing architectures. To carry it out will require the design of electronic neurons and synapses. There are several features to be copied from mother’s nature design: it has to be fast, energetically efficient and it has to have a long term/short term plasticity. And at Lanzalab, they’ve achieved most of them. Their h-BN devices consume between 0.1 fW and 600 pW and they have a truly fast response: around 10ns.
We made this image supervised by Prof. Mario Lanza to illustrate their work published in Nature Electronics.