Large-Scale Neuromorphic Spiking Array Processors: A Quest to Mimic the Brain

Frontiers in Neuroscience

Elisabetta Chicca¹  Gert Cauwenberghs²  Ralph Etienne-Cummings³  Jamal Lottier Molin³  Chetan Singh Thakur⁴  Kundan Kumar⁴  Giacomo Indiveri⁵  Ning Qiao⁵  Johannes Schemmel⁶  Jennifer Olson Hasler⁷  Shimeng Yu⁸  Yu Cao⁸  Jae-sun Seo⁸  André van Schaik⁹  Runchun Wang⁹ 

[1] Cognitive Interaction Technology – Center of Excellence, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany;Department of Bioengineering and Institute for Neural Computation, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States;Department of Electronic Systems Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India;Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;Kirchhoff Institute for Physics, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany;School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States;School of Electrical, Computer and Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, United States;The MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, Kingswood, NSW, Australia;

关键词: neuromorphic engineering;    large-scale systems;    brain-inspired computing;    analog sub-threshold;    spiking neural emulator;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fnins.2018.00891

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Neuromorphic engineering (NE) encompasses a diverse range of approaches to information processing that are inspired by neurobiological systems, and this feature distinguishes neuromorphic systems from conventional computing systems. The brain has evolved over billions of years to solve difficult engineering problems by using efficient, parallel, low-power computation. The goal of NE is to design systems capable of brain-like computation. Numerous large-scale neuromorphic projects have emerged recently. This interdisciplinary field was listed among the top 10 technology breakthroughs of 2014 by the MIT Technology Review and among the top 10 emerging technologies of 2015 by the World Economic Forum. NE has two-way goals: one, a scientific goal to understand the computational properties of biological neural systems by using models implemented in integrated circuits (ICs); second, an engineering goal to exploit the known properties of biological systems to design and implement efficient devices for engineering applications. Building hardware neural emulators can be extremely useful for simulating large-scale neural models to explain how intelligent behavior arises in the brain. The principal advantages of neuromorphic emulators are that they are highly energy efficient, parallel and distributed, and require a small silicon area. Thus, compared to conventional CPUs, these neuromorphic emulators are beneficial in many engineering applications such as for the porting of deep learning algorithms for various recognitions tasks. In this review article, we describe some of the most significant neuromorphic spiking emulators, compare the different architectures and approaches used by them, illustrate their advantages and drawbacks, and highlight the capabilities that each can deliver to neural modelers. This article focuses on the discussion of large-scale emulators and is a continuation of a previous review of various neural and synapse circuits (Indiveri et al., 2011). We also explore applications where these emulators have been used and discuss some of their promising future applications.

【 授权许可】

Unknown