Scalable nanofocusing heterojunctions for raptor-inspired on-chip vision perception

Biological visual systems provide a blueprint for intelligent perception in complex dynamic environments. Inspired by the optical role of retinal oil droplets in raptor vision, we report a plasmonic nanofocusing synaptic array (PNSA) for bioinspired visual sensing and motion perception. The pivotal design is a wafer-scale Au@MoS₂ core-shell heterojunction that enhances light concentration like the retinal oil droplets of raptors. Leveraging strong localized surface plasmon resonance in the Au core and efficient hot-carrier generation in the MoS₂ shell, the PNSA exhibits an ultrafast relaxation time of 2.2 ms, corresponding to a theoretical refresh rate of ∼450 Hz. Uniform 2-inch wafer-scale fabrication enables a 32 × 32 optoelectronic synaptic array with 100% yield and only 2.2% device-to-device variation. The array supports 5-bit optical programming and generates temporally encoded motion representations that achieve 98.95% accuracy in motion-direction classification after 10 training epochs. This work establishes a scalable materials platform for bioinspired visual sensing, offering a promising route toward on-chip vision perception.