#neurogrid

Most of us would like to take a peep into the future, and to know what is around the corner, but in reality we hardly need to do that. Progress is made so fast in so many fields that the future is constantly shifting to today. Yes, the future is already here, and there is so much of it that it is often not even newsworthy. A motoring show may pinpoint an innovation, or a medical seminar may reveal a new treatment, but most innovations pass us by without mention. Here are a few innovations and designs that I think it is worth knowing about, if only to mention them in conversation with your work mates.

By Tanya Lewis, LiveScience.com, May 2, 2014

Despite advances in computing, today’s computers remain far less efficient than the 3-lb. (2.3-kg) hunk of matter in our skulls. But a new microchip modeled on the human brain is much faster and more efficient than a typical computer, researchers report.

The microchip--called “Neurogrid”--could open up windows into understanding the human brain and developing new forms of computing patterned after brain circuits. Researchers are now investigating how these chips could be used to control prosthetic limbs.

“From a pure energy perspective, the brain is hard to match,” Kwabena Boahen, the bioengineer at Stanford University who led the chip’s development, said in a statement. Not only are personal computers slower, they take 40,000 times more power than the brain to run, Boahen said.

Neurogrid consists of 16 custom-designed Neurocore chips in a device the size of an iPad, which can simulate 1 million neurons and billions of synapses, or brain connections. That’s a vast improvement over previous brain simulations, but still only a fraction of the roughly 80 billion neurons in a human brain, researchers said.

Neurogrid uses about 9,000 times less power than a typical PC, by having synapses share hardware circuits, and about the same amount of power as a tablet.

In addition to modeling the human brain, Boahen is working with other Stanford researchers to adapt Neurogrid for controlling prosthetic limbs for paralyzed people. The chip would translate brain signals into movements of the limb, without overheating the brain. Another possible application is using Neurogrid to control humanoid robots.

Currently, programming the chip requires an understanding of how the brain works. But Boahen wants to create a “neurocompiler” that would let engineers and computer scientists with no neuroscience knowledge to program Neurogrid.

The Stanford team’s work is just one of many efforts to model the human brain using computers. The European Union’s Human Brain Project aims to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer. The U.S. BRAIN Initiative (short for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) takes a more general approach, developing new tools for measuring neuron and brain circuit activity.

IBM’s SyNAPSE project (short for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics) aims to design chips, called Golden Gate chips, modeled after the vast number of connections among neurons in the brain that help it solve problems efficiently. Each Golden Gate chip consists of 256 digital neurons with 1,024 digital synapses each, and the company plans to increase these numbers.

Germany’s Heidelberg University has its BrainScales project, which aims to create analog chips that mimic neurons and synapses that could model drug interactions at a faster rate than currently possible. Researchers have developed the HICANN chip (short for High Input Count Analog Neural Network), which can simulate 512 neurons with 224 synapses each, which they also plan to expand soon.

These various efforts have made different trade-offs in capability and performance, but Neurogrid was the most cost-effective, Boahen said.

Scientists create circuit board modeled on the human brain

Stanford scientists 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.

Ben Varkey Benjamin, Peiran Gao, Emmett McQuinn, Swadesh Choudhary, Anand R. Chandrasekaran, Jean-Marie Bussat, Rodrigo Alvarez-Icaza, John V. Arthur, Paul A. Merolla, Kwabena Boahen. Neurogrid: A Mixed-Analog-Digital Multichip System for Large-Scale Neural Simulations. Proceedings of the IEEE, 2014; 1 DOI: 10.1109/JPROC.2014.2313565

As advanced manufacturers, we at TMG love staying up-to-date on the latest and greatest printed electronics solutions on the market today.  It’s not only fun for us to learn about our passion, but we have to keep our heads in the game if we want to continue to improve what we do here in-factory and maintain the level of PCB manufacturing performance that our customers have come to expect!  The most recent tech story that’s captured our team’s imagination has been researchers, developers, and students’ tireless search for a way to mimic human brain activity with computers.  It’s an exciting prospect. The idea of a world where computers work like brains would be extremely rewarding for the advanced manufacturing industry as well as cognitively-disabled medical patients across the globe.  Let’s take a look at just how fast the world’s fastest computers are, who’s making them, and when we might expect to see the first “digital brain.”

Great Britain and the US have both announced campaigns recently that aim to create computer-generated brains in order to push the bounds of what is possible in tech and medicine.  Yesterday, Stanford University announced that they’ve designed and tested a microchip that has been modeled on the human brain.  Unfortunately, up to this point, these “exascale brains” have only been able to mimic the activity of a human brain.  However, as long as science and technology progress at their current speed, one would imagine that a finalized version of these sorts of cutting-edge electronics will undoubtedly one day help us make huge strides in medicine and robotics.

  Stanford’s “brain,” straight out of a sci-fi film, is modeled on an energy efficient microchip that operates 9,000 times faster than today’s most powerful PCs. Computers have been developed in the past that can rival the human brain, but one of the biggest drawbacks was the overwhelming amount of energy that they required.  This latest development uses 40,000 less power to complete the same tasks. The design is based on a breakthrough setup called “Neurogrid,” which is a circuit of 16 chips that can simulate billions of synaptic connections and do the work of up to 1 million neurons.  But here’s the real kicker: the device runs on an iPad battery! The future is here!

Between Neurogrid and projects like IBM’s SyNAPSE, we’ve never been closer to re-creating the complex and intricate processes of our own human cognitive processes, which means it might only be a matter of time before we see unprecedented advances in prosthetic limbs and other medical and scientific miracles.  The price (40,000 bucks!) is simply too high for mass-production to be possible at this point, but as research advances and the price falls, Stanford’s latest innovation could forever change the way we, as electronics engineers, medical professionals, and patients live, work, and play.