The concept of biomimetic systems was introduced in the early definition of bioelectronics. As we have already seen in the first chapter, the original definition of bioelectronics set by Wolfgang Göpel includes “structures [that] may consist… of chemically synthesized units such as molecules, supramolecules and biologically active (biomimetic) recognition centers” [1]. Over the years, the concept has been expanded in order to move from simple recognition systems to biomimetic membranes for voltage shifts in graphene-based transistors [2], systems for cell separation in the blood [3], electronic noses [4, 5], electronic tongues [6], smart info-chemical communication systems [7], electronic design [8], pancreatic beta-cells [9], and neurons [10].

Artificial brain architectures, with all the neurons fully interconnected in parallel, show issues in terms of scalability, especially because the number of interconnections scales exponentially with the number of neurons [11], while it would be desirable for it to scale like biologically plausible architectures [11]. This brings us to the concept of bio-inspired or biomimetic systems as possible solutions to solve problems emerging in extremely complex bioelectronics architectures. Over the years, several bio-inspired and neuromorphic architectures have been proposed in the literature for silicon neurons [10], synaptic and neural components made of NiTi [12, 13], sensors [14], orientation tuning devices [15], and pattern recognition systems [16]. In the direction of more complexity and functionality, the present state-of-the-art in the field proposes artificial systems for pancreas [9], skin [17, 18], cognitive architectures, and brains [19, 20].