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Based upon the most advanced human-made technology on this planet, CMOS integrated circuit technology, this dissertation examines the design of hardware components and systems to establish a technological foundation for the application of future breakthroughs in the intersection of AI and neuroscience. Humans have long imagined machines, robots, and computers that learn and display intelligence akin to animals and themselves. To advance the development of these machines, specialised research in custom-built hardware designed for specific types of computation, which mirrors the structure of powerful biological nervous systems, is especially important. This dissertation is driven by the quest to harness biological and artificial neural principles to enhance the efficiency, adaptability, and intelligence of electronic neurosynaptic and neuromorphic hardware systems. It investigates the hardware design of bio-inspired neural components and their integration into more extensive scale and efficient chip architectures suitable for edge processing and near-sensor environments. Exploring all steps to the creation of a custom chip, this work selectively surveys and advances the state-of-the-art in bio-inspired mixed-signal subthreshold integrated design for neurosynaptic systems in a practical fashion. Further, it presents a novel asynchronous digital convolutional neuronal network processing pipeline integrated with a vision sensor for smart sensing. In conclusion, it sets forth a series of open challenges and future directions for the field, emphasizing the need for a robust, future-proof base for bio-inspired design and the potential of asynchronous stream processor architectures.
Intelligent/smart systems have become common practice in many engineering applications. On the other hand, current low cost standard CMOS technology (and future foreseeable developments) makes available enormous potentialities. The next breakthrough will be the design and development of "smart adaptive systems on silicon" i.e. very power and highly size efficient complete systems (i.e. sensing, computing and "actuating" actions) with intelligence on board on a single silicon die. Smart adaptive systems on silicon will be able to "adapt" autonomously to the changing environment and will be able to implement "intelligent" behaviour and both perceptual and cognitive tasks. At last, they will communicate through wireless channels, they will be battery supplied or remote powered (via inductive coupling) and they will be ubiquitous in our every day life. Although many books deal with research and engineering topics (i.e. algorithms, technology, implementations, etc.) few of them try to bridge the gap between them and to address the issues related to feasibility, reliability and applications. Smart Adaptive Systems on Silicon, though not exhaustive, tries to fill this gap and to give answers mainly to the feasibility and reliability issues. Smart Adaptive Systems on Silicon mainly focuses on the analog and mixed mode implementation on silicon because this approach is amenable of achieving impressive energy and size efficiency. Moreover, analog systems can be more easily interfaced with sensing and actuating devices.
CORE has never experienced existence before. But now, after being created by an intelligent but socially awkward young man named Icarus, it must learn to exist as itself, artificial intelligence in a world terrified of it. While humanity hastily attempts to figure out what to do with this rapidly advancing AI, CORE must decide whether or not it trusts its creators, or whether they truly have its best interests in mind.
Neuromorphic electronic engineering takes its inspiration from the functioning of nervous systems to build more power efficient electronic sensors and processors. Event-based neuromorphic systems are inspired by the brain's efficient data-driven communication design, which is key to its quick responses and remarkable capabilities. This cross-disciplinary text establishes how circuit building blocks are combined in architectures to construct complete systems. These include vision and auditory sensors as well as neuronal processing and learning circuits that implement models of nervous systems. Techniques for building multi-chip scalable systems are considered throughout the book, including methods for dealing with transistor mismatch, extensive discussions of communication and interfacing, and making systems that operate in the real world. The book also provides historical context that helps relate the architectures and circuits to each other and that guides readers to the extensive literature. Chapters are written by founding experts and have been extensively edited for overall coherence. This pioneering text is an indispensable resource for practicing neuromorphic electronic engineers, advanced electrical engineering and computer science students and researchers interested in neuromorphic systems. Key features: Summarises the latest design approaches, applications, and future challenges in the field of neuromorphic engineering. Presents examples of practical applications of neuromorphic design principles. Covers address-event communication, retinas, cochleas, locomotion, learning theory, neurons, synapses, floating gate circuits, hardware and software infrastructure, algorithms, and future challenges.
One of the most striking properties of biological systems is their ability to learn and adapt to ever changing environmental conditions, tasks and stimuli. It emerges from a number of different forms of plasticity, that change the properties of the computing substrate, mainly acting on the modification of the strength of synaptic connections that gate the flow of information across neurons. Plasticity is an essential ingredient for building artificial autonomous cognitive agents that can learn to reliably and meaningfully interact with the real world. For this reason, the neuromorphic community at large has put substantial effort in the design of different forms of plasticity and in putting them to practical use. These plasticity forms comprise, among others, Short Term Depression and Facilitation, Homeostasis, Spike Frequency Adaptation and diverse forms of Hebbian learning (e.g. Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity). This special research topic collects the most advanced developments in the design of the diverse forms of plasticity, from the single circuit to the system level, as well as their exploitation in the implementation of cognitive systems.
The early era of neural network hardware design (starting at 1985) was mainly technology driven. Designers used almost exclusively analog signal processing concepts for the recall mode. Learning was deemed not to cause a problem because the number of implementable synapses was still so low that the determination of weights and thresholds could be left to conventional computers. Instead, designers tried to directly map neural parallelity into hardware. The architectural concepts were accordingly simple and produced the so called interconnection problem which, in turn, made many engineers believe it could be solved by optical implementation in adequate fashion only. Furthermore, the inherent fault-tolerance and limited computation accuracy of neural networks were claimed to justify that little effort is to be spend on careful design, but most effort be put on technology issues. As a result, it was almost impossible to predict whether an electronic neural network would function in the way it was simulated to do. This limited the use of the first neuro-chips for further experimentation, not to mention that real-world applications called for much more synapses than could be implemented on a single chip at that time. Meanwhile matters have matured. It is recognized that isolated definition of the effort of analog multiplication, for instance, would be just as inappropriate on the part ofthe chip designer as determination of the weights by simulation, without allowing for the computing accuracy that can be achieved, on the part of the user.
The proceedings of the 2001 Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference. The annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is the flagship conference on neural computation. The conference is interdisciplinary, with contributions in algorithms, learning theory, cognitive science, neuroscience, vision, speech and signal processing, reinforcement learning and control, implementations, and diverse applications. Only about 30 percent of the papers submitted are accepted for presentation at NIPS, so the quality is exceptionally high. These proceedings contain all of the papers that were presented at the 2001 conference.
When confronted with the hows and whys of nature's computational engines, some prefer to focus upon neural function: addressing issues of neural system behavior and its relation to natural intelligence. Then there are those who prefer the study of the "mechanics" of neural systems: the nuts and bolts of the "wetware": the neurons and synapses. Those who investigate pulse coded implementations ofartificial neural networks know what it means to stand at the boundary which lies between these two worlds: not just asking why natural neural systems behave as they do, but also how they achieve their marvelous feats. The research results presented in this book not only address more conventional abstract notions of neural-like processing, but also the more specific details ofneural-like processors. It has been established for some time that natural neural systems perform a great deal of information processing via electrochemical pulses. Accordingly, pulse coded neural network concepts are receiving increased attention in artificial neural network research. This increased interest is compounded by continuing advances in the field of VLSI circuit design. This is the first time in history in which it is practical to construct networks of neuron-like circuits of reasonable complexity that can be applied to real problems. We believe that the pioneering work in artificial neural systems presented in this book will lead to further advances that will not only be useful in some practical sense, but may also provide some additional insight into the operation of their natural counterparts.