A Polymorphic Reconfigurable Multi‐Electrode Device Based on Electrically Bistable Nanostructured Metallic Films

ABSTRACT The scale‐up of computation performances required by the rapidly increasing demand for the analysis and management of large databases poses serious doubts about the sustainability of von Neumann hardware architectures. Unconventional computing, taking inspiration from biological models and relying on self‐assembled systems based on nanoparticles and nanowires, may offer interesting alternatives. Here, we report the experimental characterization of the mechanisms that regulate the bistable electrical behavior and the resistive switching of self‐assembled gold nanostructured thin films. We show that the adaptive reconfiguration properties of the nanostructured network under specific input stimuli drive the reprogrammability of the device. We demonstrate how this system can be employed for the implementation of polymorphic devices, which can be used both as unconventional multiplexers (MUX) and as reconfigurable threshold logic gates (TLG), able to generate a complete set of Boolean functions.