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 0.18 um 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 $1.1mm^2$ including I/O pads.