Nov 2022
Neuromorphic engineering is inspired by the efficiency of the brain and focusses on how to emulate and utilise its functionality in hardware. Organic electronic materials have the potential to operate at the interface with biology and offer promising solutions for the manipulation and the processing of biological signals with potential applications ranging from efficient artificial intelligence systems and bioinformatics to brain-computer-interfaces and smart robotics. Despite inspiring work on large crossbar arrays of two-terminal memristive devices leading to the development of promising neuromorphic systems, delivering a compact and efficient parallel computing technology that is capable of embedding artificial neural networks in hardware remains a significant challenge. Organic electronic materials have shown potential to overcome some of these limitations. This talk describes state-of-the-art organic neuromorphic devices and provides an overview of the current challenges in the field and attempts to address them. I demonstrate a concept based on novel organic mixed-ionic electronic materials and show how we can use these devices in trainable biosensors and smart autonomous robotics. Next to that, organic electronic materials have the potential to operate at the interface with biology. This can pave the way for novel architectures with bio-inspired features, offering promising solutions for the manipulation and the processing of biological signals and potential applications ranging from brain-computer-interfaces and smart robotics to bioinformatics. I will highlight our recent efforts for such hybrid biological memory devices.
Yoeri van de Burgt is Associate Professor in the Microsystems Section at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands, as well as a member of the Institute of Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS). Currently, his research focuses on studying the optimisation of materials for organic neuromorphic devices to develop neuromorphic arrays for brain-inspired computing, smart biosensors and diagnostic lab-on-a-chips. Yoeri obtained his PhD degree at Eindhoven University of Technology in 2014. He then worked at a high-tech start-up in Switzerland, after which he obtained a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University. At the end of 2016, van de Burgt returned to Eindhoven to lead the Neuromorphic Engineering group. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge in 2017 and at Georgia Tech in 2022. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2018 and is one of the MIT Technology Review innovators under 35 Europe 2019. He is also a member of the scientific advisory board of the Centre for Cognitive Systems and Materials (Cognigron) at the University of Groningen. Yoeri is an associate editor for Frontiers in Neuroscience: Neuromorphic Engineering and he serves on the editorial board of IOP’s Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering.