Neuromorphic Chips
**Originally Aired December 2005 on Glimpse of Tomorrow** Text Transcript
The term neuromorphic was coined by Carver Mead, in the late 1980s to describe Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) systems containing electronic analog circuits that mimic neuro-biological architectures present in the nervous system.
“The brain does not execute coded instructions; instead it activates links, or synapses, between neurons. Each such activation is equivalent to executing a digital instruction, so one can compare how many connections a brain activates every second with the number of instructions a computer executes during the same time. Synaptic activity is staggering: 10 quadrillion (1016) neural connections a second. It would take a million Intel Pentium-powered computers to match that rate—plus a few hundred megawatts to juice them up.”A group of innovative engineers are developing what they hope will one day become a silicon replica of biological functions.
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