Replicating Brain Structures in Hardware

Posted 21 Jul 2006 at 22:45 UTC by steve

We've reported before on Steve Furber's project, named FIRE, aimed at building a scalable hardware neural network chip that emulates the structure of biological neurons. A recent Electronic News article offers an update on his progress. Furber, who is one of the architects of the ARM and the asynchronous Amulet processors, is now working with a company called Silistix to develop the communications structure that will allow neurons to have thousands or tens of thousands of interconnections with each other, while still allowing the design to scale to an arbitrarily large number of chips. Each chip will be a 130nm CMOS device with around 100 million transistors that will emulate the structure and functioning of around 256 biological neurons.