Ferroelectric connections for IC neural networks

There has been a great deal of interest in producing integrated circuit devices which implement artificial neural networks (ANN) directly as analog circuits. The development of very dense connection schemes which allow electrical control of the connection efficacy would be very beneficial to such implementations. This paper will report on the use of ferroelectric thin-films in such connection elements. These may be fabricated using thin-film deposition techniques above the CMOS circuitry imposing little space penalty. Specifically, we report on two different connection schemes. The first will support binary weighted connections, while the second will support continuous-valued weights and promises non-volatile operation.