Firing activities induced by various stimuli in a memristive ion channel-based bionic circuit

This paper builds a memristive ion channel-based bionic circuit and deploys various stimuli to drive the circuit to reveal dynamical effects of different external stimuli. The bionic circuit possesses a first-order N-type locally active memristor (N-LAM) with a reversal voltage to depict the properties of the biological ion channel, a capacitor to represent the neuronal membrane, and a current stimulus to simulate external stimulus on a neuron. Numerical simulations reveal that low- and high-frequency sinusoidal stimuli can induce bursting and spiking behaviors, respectively. Interestingly, the low-frequency sinusoidal stimulus can act as a slow variable to trigger fast-slow dynamics to generate the bursting behavior. A direct current (DC) stimulus can drive the circuit to exhibit frequency self-adaptation characteristics. That is, the frequency of the spiking behaviors is related to the current intensity. Besides, a pulse current stimulus can trigger instantaneous firing activities with controllable timing interval and spike counts by adjusting the amplitude of the pulse current stimulus. Furthermore, discrete component-based hardware experiments are conducted and the experimental results well validate the numerical simulations. These numerical and experimental findings demonstrate that the proposed bionic circuit can effectively generate neuron-like firing activities and regulate the firing activities by various external stimuli.