Dynamical behaviors and firing patterns in a fully memory-element emulator-based bionic circuit

Memory-element-based bionic circuits can well characterize the electrophysiological behavior of a biological neuron and generate abundant neuron-like firing patterns. This paper deploys a charge-controlled memcapacitor, a voltage-controlled locally active memristor (LAM) with one DC voltage bias, a flux-controlled meminductor, and a sinusoidal stimulus to respectively characterize the neuronal membrane, ion channel, electromagnetic induction, and external stimulus, thereby a fully memory-element emulator-based bionic circuit is constructed. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the bionic circuit achieves diverse pattern transition behaviors through the forward/reverse period-doubling bifurcation routes, tangent bifurcation, and chaos crisis for the circuit parameters, which trigger diverse firing patterns, e.g., periodic and chaotic spiking activities. Besides, a hardware circuit using discrete components is successfully synthesized by memory-element emulators, and experimental measurements are carried out to support the numerical results and demonstrate the capability of the bionic circuit to produce neuron-like firing patterns. • A fully memory-element emulator-based bionic circuit is firstly constructed. • Dynamical behaviors and firing patterns for circuit parameters are numerically explored. • Hardware experiments are performed to validate the numerically simulated firing patterns.