  Submicron-sized mesas of resonant tunneling diodes (RTDs) with split drain
contacts have been realized and the current-voltage characteristics have been
studied in the bistable regime at room temperature. Dynamically-biased, the
RTDs show noise-triggered firing of spike-like signals and can act as
reconfigurable universal logic gates for small voltage changes of a few mV at
the input branches. These observations are interpreted in terms of a stochastic
nonlinear processes in the split RTD, which are found to be robust against
noise. The split RTDs show also gain for the fired-signal bursts, can be easily
integrated to arrays of multiple inputs and have thus the potential to mimic
neuron nodes in nanoelectronic circuits.
