[Tyler]

New Neural Hardware from the FACETS Project
     


In 2007, we
told you about Stanford's
Neurocore chip which sported a 256x256 array of neurons, each
designed to duplicate biological neurons down to the level of protein pores
and ion channels. A new generation of neural network hardware is being
developed
by the Fast Analog
Computing with Emergent Transient States (FACETS) Project. The
FACETS hardware will have 200,000 neurons with 50 million synapses built
on a single silicon wafer. Current prototypes are running 100,000 times
faster than their biological couterparts, allowing a full day of neural
activity to be simulated in less than a second.
Physicist
Karlheinz Meier, who coordinates the project, said,

We may then be able to make computing devices which are radically
different and have amazing performance which, at some point, may
approach the performance of the human brain – or even go beyond
it!”
Aside from being much faster than computer simulations of neural
networks, neural hardware is also much more power efficient, typically
using only a tiny fraction of the power consumed by attempts to simulate
large networks on super computers such as the Blue Brain Project. For
more, see the Technology
Review article, the Science
Daily article, or check out the many technical
papers available from FACET. (image courtesy of FACETS Project,
Ruprecht-Karls Universität
Heidelberg).
   

http://robots.net/article/2790.html