Ionoelastomer Synapses With Configurable Synaptic Plasticity
Sijie Zheng1, Zhong-Da Zhang3, Xiaowei Wang1, Xiuyang Zou4, Ziyang Liu1, Qingning Li1, Ya-Nan Zhong3, Sui-Dong Wang3,5（王穗东）*, Feng Yan1,2（严锋）*
1Jiangsu Engineering Laboratory of Novel Functional Polymeric Materials Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Advanced Negative Carbon Technologies College of Chemistry Suzhou Key Laboratory of Soft Material and New Energy College of Chemistry Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Soochow University Suzhou 215123, China
2State Key Laboratory of Advanced Fiber Materials College of Materials Science and Engineering Donghua University Shanghai 201620, China
3State Key Laboratory of Bioinspired Interfacial Materials Science Institute of Functional Nano and Soft Materials (FUNSOM) Soochow University Suzhou 215123, China
4School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Huaiyin Normal University Huaian 223300, China
5Macao Institute of Materials Science and Engineering (MIMSE) Macau University of Science and Technology Macao 999078, China
Adv. Mater. 2025, 37, e05312
Abstract: An organic heterostructure, composed of an ionoelastomer that comprises polycationic chains and mobile anions, and a semiconducting polymer, forms a new class of artificial synapses. These ionoelastomer synapses update their synaptic weights by modifying device conductance through the spatial redistribution of anions in response to electrical stimuli. The memory effect of these synapses is highly dependent on the specific anion species present, providing a unique means to modulate synaptic plasticity simply through anion selection. The continuously programmable and nonvolatile states of the selected ionoelastomer synapse are harnessed to emulate a soft neural network and perform the handwritten digit and fashion image recognition tasks, which achieve high recognition accuracies comparable to ideal numeric model but only using 16 discrete device states.
Article information: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202505312
