Spiking activity in a memcapacitive and memristive emulator-based bionic circuit

The diversity of spiking activity of a bionic circuit is a vital footstone in developing spike-based applications. The bionic circuit constructed by membrane theory frequently employs an invariable capacitor to characterize the electrophysiological behaviors of the neuron membrane. Actually, the thickness and medium property of a neuron membrane are regulated by its membrane potential, which leads to the invariable capacitor suffering from inaccuracy in expressing the regulating process. To solve this issue, a memcapacitive emulator with controllable capacitance is deployed to characterize the neuron membrane in this paper. Then, a memcapacitive and memristive emulator-based (MC-MR-emulator-based) bionic circuit is first built, which involves only a memcapacitive emulator, a locally active memristive emulator, a DC voltage source, and an externally applied current stimulus. Numerical explorations display that the MC-MR-emulator-based bionic circuit can generate rich bifurcation behaviors, e.g., period-doubling bifurcation, tangent bifurcation, and crisis scenario, related to the current stimulus, memristive emulator parameters, and memcapacitive emulator parameters. These bifurcation behaviors lead to that the MC-MR-emulator-based bionic circuit can produce abundant periodic and chaotic spiking activities. In analog experiments, memcapacitor and memristor emulators are utilized. PCB-based hardware experimental results well address the validity of the numerical explorations and further exhibit the effectiveness of the MC-MR-emulator-based bionic circuit in generating spiking activities.