Analyzing the influence of parasitic effects on

memristor STDP with the PEEC method

2022 Asia-Pacific International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility (APEMC) | 978-1-6654-1671-9/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/APEMC53576.2022.9888491

Can Wang1, Shurun Tan1,2,3* , and Erping Li1,2,3

1
Zhejiang University-University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Institute
Zhejiang University, Haining, Zhejiang 314400, China
2
State Key Laboratory of Modern Optical Instrumentation, College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering
Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China
3
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

Abstract Memristors have great application potential in
neuromorphic chips due to their integrated functionality of
storage and computing. Research on the signal integrity of
memristor crossbars under the excitation of bionic spiking
signals is in urgent need to promote the rapid development of
neuromorphic chip industry. This paper applies the Partial
Element Equivalent Circuit (PEEC) method to analyze the
influence of parasitic effects on the spike-timing-dependent
plasticity (STDP) learning behavior of a memristor under the
excitation of bionic spiking signal pairs. Study shows appreciable
differences in the STDP behaviors under extremely narrow
spiking signal excitations.
Keywords Memristor; Signal integrity; PEEC; STDP;
Parasitic effect
I. INTRODUCTION
With the rapid increase in data processing command, the
speed of traditional computer architecture is limited by the
von Neumann bottleneck [1]. Traditional von Neumann
structures separate memory from CPU, and the reading and
processing speeds on large-scale data cannot be matched due to
the limited data transfer bandwidth. A promising way to solve
this bottleneck is to adopt the in memory computing
architecture. Such structure stores and processes data at the
same time, significantly speeding up data processing.
Meanwhile, this structure has great potential to be adopted in
neuromorphic chips as neural network platforms for large-scale
data processing.
Recently, the spiking neural network (SNN) has drawn
much attention in the field of artificial intelligence. A few
leading neuromorphic chip design schemes supporting SNN
have emerged (Tianjic[2], Lohi[3], Neurogrid[4], Brain
ScalesScales[5], et. al.). Neuromorphic chips operates based on
the mechanism of biological information transmission and
processing [6]. The memristor crossbar array structure has been
proposed to implement the synaptic connection network among
neurons in neuromorphic chips, and is associated with merits of
compactness, low power consumption, high parallelism, and
resembling bionic characteristics. In this paper, we study the
signal integrity of bionic spiking signals exciting memristor
crossbar structures. The transmission of bionic spiking signals
in the memristor crossbar array is expected to be accompanied
with physical layer issues such as signal distortion, spurious
electromagnetic radiation, and environmental electromagnetic
interference.
In this paper, we apply the Partial Element Equivalent
Circuit (PEEC) method to analyze the bionic signal integrity
propagating through a transmission line connecting signal
sources and the memristor load. The PEEC method derives
parasitic parameters of high-speed interconnecting structures
through an integral equation formulation [7]. And circuit
theory is then applied to characterize signal propagation and
distortion [8].
The parasitic effects, leading to signal distortions, will
further influence the dynamics of memristor resistances, a
property resembling synaptic plasticity in bionic neural
networks that affects the learning behaviors of the network. In
this paper, the spiking time dependent plasticity (STDP) [9] of
a memristor is evaluated as excited by spiking signal pairs of
pre-defined delays. The STDP behaviors of the memristor as
affected by parasitic effects are examined.
II. METHODOLOGY
A. The PEEC method
In a conductin
we can link the incident electric field with the vector potential
A and scalar potential as follows,
J (r , t ) A(r , t )
Ein (r , t ) (r , t ) (1)
t
where represents the incident field, represents the
current density, represents the conductivity, represents
the scalar potential, and represents the magnetic vector.
Divide the conductors into volume element and
surface elements. Let the volume element and surface element
be differed by half the element size. Assume the medium has
no dispersion and there is no incident field in space. Integrate
Eq. (1) over one of the elements to obtain

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 both ports of the memristor, is the structural parameter of
the memristor, is the threshold for the change of the
memristor resistance, and is a constant related to the
(2) memristor material.
(3) D. The odified nodal analysis (MNA) method
Comparing Eq. (2) with the KVL equation (3), we can The circuit composed of the extracted parasitic parameters
obtain formulas of effective partial element resistances, are analyzed by the MNA method [12]:
inductances and capacitances:
(11)
(4)

(5) where is the inductance connection matrix, is the node

voltage vector, is the loop current vector, and are the
(6) excitation source connection matrices, is the source current
In Eqs. (4-6), represents the x, y, z directions, is the length and is the source voltage.
of a cell . represents the cross-sectional area of a cell .
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
is the cross-sectional area of a cell . And is the In this paper, the microstrip line structure as shown in Fig. 1
cross-section of the volume element perpendicular to the is analyzed, of which the parasitic parameters of resistance,
current direction . represents the area of the surface inductance, and capacitance are extracted with the PEEC
element. quasi-static method.

B. The spiking signal model

In this paper, the excitation source uses a voltage source that
resembles bionic spiking signals. The mathematical expression
of the bionic signal is as follows [10]:

Fig.1 Simplified microstrip line structure. Node 1 is connected to the

excitation source, nodes 2 and 7 are connected to the load, and node 4 outputs
a signal. = 100nm, = 10um, = 1um, = 30nm. The upper and lower
plates are made of copper.

In Fig. 1, node 1 is connected to a voltage source generating

the difference of two bionic spiking signals separated by an
offset T in spiking time as illustrated in the insets of Fig. 2.
(7) The voltage source has an internal resistance of 50 Ohm. The
where and represent the amplitude of forward and load connected between node 2 and node 7 is a memristor with
initial resistance 80.5 kOhm. The input voltage cross node 1
reverse signals, and represent the duration of forward and 4 and the output voltage across node 2 and 7 are computed
and reverse signals, and , control the rising / falling edges and compared in Fig 2 for two cases of spiking signal
of forward and reverse signals, respectively. durations T.

C. The Memristor model

This paper assumes a voltage flux driven memristor, and its
model is as follows [11]:
(8)
(9)

(10) (a)

where represents the current passing through the memristor,

is the conductivity of the memristor, is the voltage at

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(b)
Fig. 2 Input and output voltages and the memristor resistance change (The
upper left corner is the input bionic spiking signal pair). (a) Input signal
duration T = 0.8ns, and the interval between the two signals is T = 0.03ns; (b)
Input signal duration T = 8ps, and the interval between the two signals is T =
0.3ps.
In Fig. 2, the two spiking signal durations under study are
0.8ns and 8ps, respectively. The spiking time offsets between
the two signals are 0.03ns and 0.3ps, respectively. Although
the initial resistance of the memristor is the same, it ends up at
different values. The memristor value will change when the
applied voltage across its two ends exceeds a certain threshold.
It is noted that in the second case with the shorter spiking
signals, there are obvious distortions in the load voltage
compared to the source voltage due to parasitic effects of the
interconnecting wires. Such distortion will further affect the
dynamic change of the memristor resistances.
(a)
(b)
Fig. 3 Impact of parasitic effects on memristor STDP behavior. (a) Input
signal duration T = 0.8ns. (b) Input signal duration T = 8ps.
In Fig. 3, we extract the STDP behaviors of the memristor
for the two spiking signal durations from multiple simulations
as reported in Fig. 2 with different offset time T
achieved STDP curves is compared with the ideal STDP
without parasitic effects. It is noted that the shorter spiking
signal duration is associated with appreciable differences in
the achieved STDP behaviors due to parasitic effects, which
will in turn affect the spiking neural network learning
characteristics.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, parasitic parameters such as the capacitance,
resistance, and inductance of a simplified microstrip line
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structure are extracted with the PEEC method. The signal
integrity of a pair of bionic spiking signals propagating
through the interconnecting lines is analyzed. The load voltage
is compared between a fixed-resistance and a memristor. The
STDP behavior of the memristor is also derived and compared
between the two cases with and without the parasitic effects
from the interconnecting structure. It is found that when the
bionic spiking signal is extremely narrow on the order of
fractions of a nanosecond, the spiking signal can be distorted
over a short transmission distance spanned by a memristor
crossbar array. This dispersion will affect the STDP behavior
of the memristor with an appreciable difference, which will in
turn influence the learning behavior of the SNN system.
Further study will investigate the parasitic effects induced by
cross coupling among multiple connecting lines in a
memristor crossbar structure and the effects of medium
dispersion on the bionic spiking signal integrity.
V. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors acknowledge support from the start-up funds of
Zhejiang University, the ZJU-SUTD IDEA Research Grants,
the Dynamic Research Enterprise for Multidisciplinary
Engineering Sciences (DREMES) seed project of the ZJU-
UIUC joint research center, and a project supported by
scientific research fund of Zhejiang Provincial Education
Department (Y202148320).
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