The institute said its researchers have artificially recreated neural synapses in the device. It added the latest achievement will lay the foundation for the development of chips that will have a similar structure to the human brain and may also lead to the development of neuro-computers.
The ETRI team explains that parts for storage and arithmetic calculations coexist in the human brain. However, a computer needs two separate parts to perform both tasks. If two such parts coexist in a computer as they do in a human brain, transmission of information and arithmetic operations in computers can be carried out almost simultaneously.
“Researchers have been focusing their efforts on developing a computer chip similar to a human brain because the brain has complete functionality in information delivery,” an ETRI official said.
The team stated in the paper: “We propose a graphene-based optical modulator and comprehensively investigate its photonic characteristics by electrically controlling the device with an ion-gel top-gate dielectric”.
They said the density of the electrically driven charge carriers in the ion-gel gate dielectric plays a core role in tuning the optical output power of the device. “The charge density at the ion-gel-graphene interface is tuned electrically, and the chemical potential of graphene is then changed to control its light absorption strength,” they said.