Implementation of Excitatory CMOS Neuron Oscillator for Robot Motion Control Unit

This paper presents an excitatory CMOS neuron oscillator circuit design, which can synchronize two neuron-bursting patterns. The excitatory CMOS neuron oscillator is composed of CMOS neurons and CMOS excitatory synapses. And the neurons and synapses are connected into a close loop. The CMOS neuron is based on the Hindmarsh-Rose (HR) neuron model and excitatory synapse is based on the chemical synapse model. In order to fabricate using a 0.18um CMOS standard process technology with 1.8V compatible transistors, both time and amplitude scaling of HR neuron model is adopted. This full-chip integration minimizes the power consumption and circuit size, which is ideal for motion control unit of the proposed bio-mimetic micro-robot. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed excitatory CMOS neuron oscillator performs the expected waveforms with scaled time and amplitude. The active silicon area of the fabricated chip is 1.1mm including I/O pads.