Building a Silicon Brain
That’s one of the ways in which neuromorphic chips aim to replicate nature, where brains seem to increase in power and efficiency as they scale up from, say, 300 neurons in a worm brain to the 85 billion or so of the human brain. Companies such as IBM and Intel have focused on digital neuromorphic chips, whose silicon neurons replicate the way information flows in biological neurons but with different physics, for the same reason that conventional digital chips have taken over the vast majority of our computers and electronics—their greater reliability and ease of manufacture. When Modha was designing IBM’s neuromorphic chip, called TrueNorth, he first analyzed long-distance wiring diagrams of the brain, which map how different brain regions connect to each other, in macaques and humans.2 “It really began to tell us about the long-distance connectivity, the short-distance connectivity, and about the neuron and synapse dynamics,” he says.
Source: www.the-scientist.com