Army of smartphone chips could emulate the human brain

May 4, 2010 | Source: New Scientist Tech

Steve Furber, a professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, is attempting to model the synaptic weights and coordinated voltage spikes of the human brain in a 1-billion-neuron silicon brain system called Spinnaker (Spiking Neural Network Architecture).

The chips, under construction in Taiwan, contain 20 ARM processor cores, each modelling 1000 neurons. With 20,000 neurons per chip, 50,000 chips will be needed to reach the target of 1 billion neurons.

His first goal is to teach it how to control a robotic arm, before working towards a design to control a humanoid. A robot controller with even a dash of brain-like properties should be much better at tasks like image recognition, navigation and decision-making,