  Spintronic artificial spiking neurons are promising due to their ability to
closely mimic the leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) dynamics of the biological LIF
spiking neuron. However, the neuron needs to be reset after firing. Few of the
spintronic neurons that have been proposed in the literature discuss the reset
process in detail. In this article, we discuss the various schemes to achieve
this reset in a magnetic domain wall (DW) based spintronic neuron in which the
position of the DW represents the membrane potential. In all the spintronic
neurons studied, the neuron enters a refractory period and is reset when the DW
reaches a particular position. We show that the self-reset operation in the
neuron devices consumes energy that can vary from of several pJ to a few fJ,
which highlights the importance of the reset strategy in improving the energy
efficiency of spintronic artificial spiking neurons.
