Single ambipolar OECT–based inverter with volatility and nonvolatility on demand

Organic electrochemical transistor (OECT)-based inverter introduces new prospects for energy-efficient brain-inspired artificial intelligence devices. Here, we report single-component OECT-based inverters by incorporating ambipolar p(gDPP-V). Notably, p(gDPP-V) shows state-of-the-art ambipolar OECT performances in both conventional (p/n-type mode transconductance of 29/25 S cm^-1) and vertical (transconductance of 297.2/292.4 μS μm^-2 under p/n operation) device architectures. Especially, the resulting highly stable vertical OECT-based inverter shows a high voltage gain of 105 V V^-1 under a low driving voltage of 0.8 V. The inverter exhibits undiscovered voltage-regulated dual mode: volatile receptor and nonvolatile synapse. Moreover, applications of physiology signal recording and demonstrations of NAND/NOR logic circuits are investigated within the volatile feature, while neuromorphic simulations with a convolutional neural network and image memorizing capabilities are explored under the nonvolatile behavior. The ambipolar OECT-based inverter, capable of both volatile and nonvolatile operations, provides possibilities for the applications of reconfigurable complementary logic circuits in novel neuromorphic computing paradigms.