COMPUTER chips that mimic the human brain are outstripping conventional chips in crucial ways. They could also revolutionise our understanding of how the brain functions.
Attempts to simulate the brain usually involve programming software to behave like groups of neurons. A new “neuromorphic” design instead tries to recreate the brain’s hardware, using analogue components last seen in the early days of computing. “On our system, you can physically point to the neuron,” says Karlheinz Meier of the University of Heidelberg in Germany.
The Spikey chip contains 400 “neurons”, or printed circuits. Real neurons have a voltage across their outer membrane, which Spikey mimics using capacitors: components that store charge. Just as in a real neuron, when the applied voltage reaches a certain level, the capacitor becomes conductive, firing a “nerve signal”.