Published in News

Boffins put brain on a chip

by on31 March 2009

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But the chip is the brain of the computer


For years
technically challenged news hacks have called the silicon chip the brains of the computer. Now it seems that a group of Euro boffins have created a chip that
really works like a human brain.

Early prototypes of the chip had  384 neurons and 100,000 synapses, but the latest version contains 200,000 neurons and 50 million synapses. Apparently the chip is able to mimic the brain's ability to learn more closely than any other machine.

Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University, in Germany, who has coordinated the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project said that even with a tiny fraction of the number found in a brain, its design allows it to be scaled up to create massively parallel, powerful new computers.

The project aims to build 'neurons' using a standard eight-inch silicon wafer so that they can produce the same sort of electrical activity as their biological counterparts.
A neuron circuit typically consists of about 100 components, while a synapse requires only about 20. However, because there are so much more of them, the synapses take up most of the space on the wafer.

By hardwiring the brain capability onto a chip means that researchers to recreate the brain-like structure in a way that is truly parallel. The current prototype can operate about 100,000 times faster than a real human brain.
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