Voltage-Controlled Skyrmion Memristor for Energy-Efficient Synapse Applications

A novel voltage-controlled skyrmion memristor (VCSK-Memristor) based on a multiferroic heterostructure is proposed and studied. Under electric-field-modulated magnetic anisotropy via remnant strain, continuously tunable resistance is obtained in a VCSK-Memristor due to the skyrmion size modulation in the ferromagnetic layer. Geometrical scaling studies on VCSK-Memristor are performed to provide the guidelines for the design and optimization of this newly proposed spintronic device. The results indicate that the VCSK-Memristor is advantageous for fabricating energy-efficient synapse arrays for hardware neural-network applications.