Engineering Synaptic Dynamics in Ag-Modified TaO$_x$ Memristive Devices
Engineering not only the magnitude but also the dynamics of synaptic weight updates is an important challenge for memristive neuromorphic hardware. Here, we show that Ag modification of TaO$_x$ memristors introduces an electrically selectable degree of freedom in synaptic depression through the interplay between Ag-related and oxygen-vacancy dynamics. Reference devices exhibit conventional bipolar switching, whereas Ag-modified devices display symmetric table-with-legs hysteresis loops, metastable intermediate states, and a strongly non-monotonic dependence of depression dynamics on programming amplitude. By varying only the pulse amplitude, the same device can be driven among three regimes: gradual sigmoidal depression, an abrupt update concentrated within a few pulses, and a broadly distributed evolution extending over more than one hundred pulses. A minimal coupled-state model, in which a vacancy-related switching variable interacts with a slower Ag-related internal degree of freedom, reproduces this gradual--abrupt--gradual crossover using two individually monotonic field-activated processes. The functional impact is assessed in a memristor-based multilayer perceptron. For MNIST, the abrupt, sigmoidal, and slowly evolving responses yield accuracies of approximately 50%, 85%, and 88%, respectively, while the gradual regime reaches approximately 72% for Fashion-MNIST. These results show that coupling Ag-related and oxygen-vacancy dynamics can transform synaptic depression from a fixed device characteristic into an electrically programmable property.