Building a Brain on a Silicon Chip

March 25, 2009 | Source: Technology Review

An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain, with 200,000 “neurons” linked up by 50 million “synaptic connections.”

(Karlheinz Meier)

(Karlheinz Meier)

A neuron circuit typically consists of about 100 components, while a synapse requires only about 20; they can operate in parallel and about 100,000 times faster than a real human brain.

The hope of the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project (FACETS) is that recreating the structure of the brain in computer form may help to further our understanding of how to develop massively parallel, powerful new computers.

Researchers at Stanford University have also been creating neuronal circuits and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency recently started funding a similar project.

The FACETS group plans to create a superchip with a total of a billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses.