Publication date: 17th July 2025
Materials that undergo a metal-to-insulator phase transition are interesting as threshold, or volatile, memristors, and they are a crucial component in self-oscillating circuits that emulate the emission of action potentials by neurons. Rare-earth (RE) nickelates (RENiO3) show a metal-to-insulator transition at temperatures that can be tuned by different parameters, such as changing the RE cations, the strain state, film thickness or the oxygen vacancy content. Compared to other transition metal oxides, nickelates are especially interesting as memristive devices because of their endurance due to the robustness of the perovskite structure to high local temperatures and electric fields. In addition, it is known that the transport properties in transition metal (TM) oxides are largely dependent on the oxygen vacancy concentration. Thus, next to using the metal-insulator transition for artificial neurons, nickelates could also be used as synaptic devices driven by redox-reactions. However, this functionality is much less understood in the nickelates. Here we show that nickelates can behave as neuristors and as synapses and we discuss the mechanisms behind the different behaviours. In addition, we show that by interfacing nickelate thin films with ferroelectrics, it is possible to combine volatile and non-volatile memristive behaviour in one device and that such combination allows to select either the neuron or the synapse functionality by switching the ferroelectric polarization with the external bias[1]. Such devices could be used in reconfigurable networks, in which the devices can be dynamically reprogrammed to operate as memristors or spiking elements [2], for the implementation of sparse firing models in SNNs [3], or in oscillating neural networks that use memristive weights to couple the oscillations of individual elements [4]. These devices can also allow oscillators to be dynamically added or removed from a population.
.References
[1] R. Hamming Green. et al. Frontiers in Materials 11, 1356610, 2024
[2] R. John et al. Nat. Commun. 13, 2074, 2022
[3] G. Belec et al. Nat. Commun. 11, 3625, 2020
[4] P. Feketa et al. EEE Trans. Automatic Control 66, 3084, 2021
nanoGe is a prestigious brand of successful science conferences that are developed along the year in different areas of the world since 2009. Our worldwide conferences cover cutting-edge materials topics like perovskite solar cells, photovoltaics, optoelectronics, solar fuel conversion, surface science, catalysis and two-dimensional materials, among many others.
Previously nanoGe Spring Meeting (NSM) and nanoGe Fall Meeting (NFM), MATSUS is a multiple symposia conference focused on a broad set of topics of advanced materials preparation, their fundamental properties, and their applications, in fields such as renewable energy, photovoltaics, lighting, semiconductor quantum dots, 2-D materials synthesis, charge carriers dynamics, microscopy and spectroscopy semiconductors fundamentals, etc.
International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics
International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV) is celebrated yearly in May. The main topics are the development, function and modeling of materials and devices for hybrid and organic solar cells. The field is now dominated by perovskite solar cells but also other hybrid technologies, as organic solar cells, quantum dot solar cells, and dye-sensitized solar cells and their integration into devices for photoelectrochemical solar fuel production.
Asia-Pacific International Conference on Perovskite, Organic Photovoltaics and Optoelectronics
The main topics of the Asia-Pacific International Conference on Perovskite, Organic Photovoltaics and Optoelectronics (IPEROP) are discussed every year in Asia-Pacific for gathering the recent advances in the fields of material preparation, modeling and fabrication of perovskite and hybrid and organic materials. Photovoltaic devices are analyzed from fundamental physics and materials properties to a broad set of applications. The conference also covers the developments of perovskite optoelectronics, including light-emitting diodes, lasers, optical devices, nanophotonics, nonlinear optical properties, colloidal nanostructures, photophysics and light-matter coupling.
The International Conference on Perovskite Thin Film Photovoltaics Perovskite Photonics and Optoelectronics (NIPHO) is the best place to hear the latest developments in perovskite solar cells as well as on recent advances in the fields of perovskite light-emitting diodes, lasers, optical devices, nanophotonics, nonlinear optical properties, colloidal nanostructures, photophysics and light-matter coupling.