In-Materio Reservoir Computing in a Sulfonated Polyaniline Network

A sulfonated polyaniline (SPAN) organic electrochemical network device (OEND) is fabricated using a simple drop-casting method on multiple Au electrodes for use in reservoir computing (RC). The SPAN network has humidity-dependent electrical properties. Under high humidity, the SPAN OEND exhibits mainly ionic conduction, including charging of an electric double layer and ionic diffusion. The nonlinearity and hysteresis of the current–voltage characteristics progressively increase with increasing humidity. The rich dynamic output behavior indicates wide variations for each electrode, which improves the RC performance because of the disordered network. For RC, waveform generation and short-term memory tasks are realized by a linear combination of outputs. The waveform task accuracy and memory capacity calculated from a short-term memory task reach 90% and 33.9, respectively. Improved spoken-digit classification is realized with 60% accuracy by only 12 outputs, demonstrating that the SPAN OEND can manage time series dynamic data operation in RC owing to a combination of rich dynamic and nonlinear electronic properties. The results suggest that SPAN-based electrochemical systems can be applied for material-based computing, by exploiting their intrinsic physicochemical behavior.