What could tomorrow’s electronics look like? One very attractive possibility would be to draw inspiration from biological systems. In particular by reproducing the key characteristics of the brain, both in terms of manufacturing and functioning. The possibility of organizing billions of neurons to achieve systems capable of seeing, feeling and hearing appears fascinating and has motivated recent work by IEMN researchers, published in the journals Nature Communications and Advanced Sciences.

In the framework of the ERC-IONOS project, IEMN researchers have investigated the possibility of growing organic materials by pulsed electro-polymerization to reproduce the dendritic growths that are responsible for the structuring of neural networks. This demonstration allows to reproduce a key property of biology: structural plasticity. And the story doesn’t end there, because these same dendritic materials can also reproduce key signal processing elements in biology such as synaptic plasticity and dendritic integration.

Structural plasticity is the mechanism that allows neural networks to imprint a 3D topology specific to a single multi-sensory experience, in order to efficiently process information. In artificial neural networks, topologies remain a major area of optimization, both at the software and hardware level. Indeed, the mechanisms allowing biology to self-organize and the rules defining optimal topologies remain largely misunderstood and are addressed empirically in the artificial world. A differentiating aspect between biology and electronics is the ability of biological systems to assemble themselves in a bottom-up manner (the basic elements are defined first, the function is obtained in a second time), while electronics is largely top-down (the functions are predefined upstream, and the components organized to reproduce them). Using pulsed electro-polymerization of PEDOT:PSS, IEMN researchers have shown that it is possible to finely control the structure of conductive dendrites in water.