Stanford bioengineers create circuit board modeled on the human brain
From: Stanford Report - 04/28/2014
By: Tom Abate

Stanford bioengineers have developed faster, more energy-efficient microchips
based on the human brain – 9,000 times faster and using significantly less
power than a typical PC. This offers greater possibilities for advances in
robotics and a new way of understanding the brain. For instance, a chip as
fast and efficient as the human brain could drive prosthetic limbs with the
speed and complexity of our own actions.

Kwabena Boahen, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford, and his
team have developed Neurogrid, a circuit board consisting of 16
custom-designed "Neurocore" chips. Together these 16 chips can simulate 1
million neurons and billions of synaptic connections. The team designed these
chips with power efficiency in mind. Their strategy was to enable certain
synapses to share hardware circuits. The result was Neurogrid – a device
about the size of an iPad that can simulate orders of magnitude more neurons
and synapses than other brain mimics on the power it takes to run a tablet
computer.

Its speed and low power characteristics make Neurogrid ideal for more than
just modeling the human brain. Boahen is working with other Stanford
scientists to develop prosthetic limbs for paralyzed people that would be
controlled by a Neurocore-like chip.

A small prosthetic arm in Boahen's lab is currently controlled by Neurogrid
to execute movement commands in real time. 

Read the entire article and view a video (2:18) at:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/april/neurogrid-boahen-engineering-042814.html

Links:
Kwabena Boahen
http://bioengineering.stanford.edu/faculty/boahen.html

Brains in Silicon
http://www.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/

Neurogrid - The Challenge
http://www.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/challenge.html

Neurogrid - The Board
http://www.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/neurogrid.html

Neurogrid - The Chip
http://www.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/goals.html

Neurogrid: A Mixed-Analog-Digital Multichip System for Large-Scale Neural
  Simulations 
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6805187&sortType%3Ddesc_p_Publication_Year%26queryText%3DBoahen

Circuit Board Mimics the Human Brain
http://www.wirelessdesignmag.com/videos/2014/04/circuit-board-mimics-human-brain

Stanford Scientists Create Circuit Board Modeled on the Human Brain
http://www.wirelessdesignmag.com/news/2014/04/stanford-scientists-create-circuit-board-modeled-human-brain