By Ferris Jabr at New Scientist
Well connected (Image: IBM)
How to replicate the squishy sophistication of the human brain in hard metal and silicon? IBM thinks it’s found a way, and to prove it has built and tested two new "cognitive computing" microchips whose design is inspired by the human brain.
In the mammalian brain, neurons send chemical signals to each other across tiny gaps called synapses. A neuron’s long "tail", the axon, sends the signals from its multiple terminals; the receptive parts of other neurons – the dendrites – collect them.
Each of IBM’s brain-mimicking silicon chips is a few square millimetres in size and holds a grid of 256 parallel wires that represent dendrites of computational "neurons" crossed at right angles by other wires standing in for axons. The "synapses" are 45-nanometre transistors connecting the criss-crossing wires and act as the chips’ memory; one chip has 262,144 of them and the other 65,536. Each electrical signal crossing a synapse consumes just 45 picajoules – a thousandth of what typical computer chips use.
Continue here: IBM unveils microchip based on the human brain – tech – 19 August 2011 – New Scientist.
