Memristor-coupled tri-capacitor membrane with a sandwich structure

The cell membrane of a biological neuron fits the capacitive property, and a capacitor becomes indispensable for building a neural circuit, which the output voltage can mimic the dynamical characteristic of membrane potential for a neuron. The activation of ion channels embedded into the cell membrane can be described by other branch circuits in parallel with the capacitor in the neural circuit, and current shunting between the paralleled branch circuits depends on the physical properties of electric components in each branch circuit. This characteristic accounts for the diversity in inductive and memristive ion channels, and changes of the energy between magnetic field and electric field support different energy levels and firing modes in the neural activities. In this article, three capacitors are connected by two different kinds of memristors for designing a functional membrane with sandwich structure, and two additive branch circuits are connected to the paralleled capacitors for shunting channel current and energy exchange, and this circuit can mimic the signal processing in an artificial neuron with three-layer membrane. Incorporation of three capacitors enable the neural circuit process electrical signals even one or two capacitors suffer breakdown or collapse, indeed, diversity in output voltage for reach capacitor enable this memristor-coupled tri-layer device as controllable signal source. Exact energy function for the theoretical model is provided to discern the correlation between energy levels and firing modes, and stochastic resonance can be induced under noisy excitation. The results are helpful for design functional neural circuits, signal sources, energy storage and understanding the role of cell membrane on signal processing.