Neuromorphic engineers are studying the nervous system and trying to emulate its function and organization in their computational and robotics systems. They are hoping to match (or perhaps even exceed) the human brain in vision, hearing, pattern recognition and learning tasks (Boahen 2005). Read the rest of this entry »

Note: This posting summarizes some arguments I presented at the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Circuits and Systems. The complete presentation is available at this link.

In an earlier posting I presented arguments of why the idea of the memristor as a fourth fundamental circuit element is likely to be wrong. However, regardless of whether or not the memristor is considered as a fundamental circuit element, one may ask if it is technically correct to say that the researchers from HPLabs actually did discover a memristor. Read the rest of this entry »

After writing several memristor models with SPICE last week, I decided to post a short tutorial here on the subject. I’ll concentrate on modeling the memristor introduced in the Nature Nanoletters’ article Memristive Switching mechanism for metal/oxide/metal nanodevices by Yang et al., published in July 2008. More specifically the model is an enhanced version of the one derived in the article CNN Using Memristors for Neighborhood Connections (IEEE CNNA 2010) by me and Mika Laiho. Read the rest of this entry »

If you had doubts before starting to read Neurdon, I think that by now you have come to the realization that there are as many neuroscientists that use computers than computer scientists that want to “use” neuroscience. This post is another example of the latter: Steve Furber, Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Manchester and leader of the team that designed the the 32bit ARM microprocessor, is trying to build a large-scale neural simulator out of ARM processors. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: This posting summarizes some arguments I presented at the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Circuits and Systems. The complete presentation is available at this link.

Much of the recent interest in HP’s finding the “missing” memristor has been based on the presumption that it is correctly interpreted as the “4^th fundamental circuit element” after the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. The original argument from Leon Chua was that there were four ways to link the variables of charge and current to the variables of flux-linkage and voltage. The resistor, capacitor, and inductor represent three ways to link these variables while the memristor was postulated as representing the “missing” link connecting charge and flux-linkage. This may seem like a reasonable argument at first glance but it is not without flaws. Read the rest of this entry »

In the past few years a lot of attention has been directed to “memristors” as a new type of memory cell and as a new component for neuromorphic electronic designs. However, currently most proposed neuromorphic designs do not yet use the 2-terminal memristive devices promoted by Leon Chua and HP but rather use more conventional electronic circuit components such as the floating gate memory cells used in Flash memory. Read the rest of this entry »

Leo Chua gave one of his brilliant talks on May 21, 2010 at the ICCNS 2010 conference at the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems. Just to be sure you get the magnitude of the event: Leon Chua is the first to theorize the existence of memristors with his paper “Memristor: The Missing Circuit Element” on IEEE TRANSACTIONS on Circuit Theory, published in September 1971. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the main motivation of the Neurdon blog is to shed light on the true innovative force behind the introduction of new computing paradigms based on the nervous system functioning. This is why when neurdons read the word cat associated with large-scale simulations, we get a little sad… readers should know that the greatest revolution that will see AI and the semiconductor industry jointly turn upside down our current use of intelligent machines has nothing to do with a bunch of cats. Though, according to PHYSORG article “Cat brain: A step toward the electronic equivalent”, the pinnacle of memristor-based computer evolution will be a cat. IBM’s “Max” (no, not Max Versace… apparently my shortened name is widely used to name unaware felines across the globe…) will be in good company. Read the rest of this entry »

According tho this post, HP plans to introduce the first commercial product based on memristor memory in three years. In case you wonder: no, it won’t be a USB brain. According to Technology Review, it will be a flash memory.

Why flash memory? This storage suffer from some of the same limitations that plague silicon transistors: the limited amount of data-writing cycles, and the physical limits that prevent increasing storage in dense memory devices. Memristor memory can withstand up to about a million read-write cycles in lab tests, and can achieve densities unreachable by conventional technologies currently employed to build flash memory devices.

Want to learn more? Check out the original post.

The DARPA SyNAPSE project is not the only attempt in the world of neuromorphic engineering to create larg-scale, low-power neuromorphic hardware. The European FACETS (Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States) project, currently in his month 55 of activity, is “to create a theoretical and experimental foundation for the realisation of novel computing paradigms which exploit the concepts experimentally observed in biological nervous systems”. Read the rest of this entry »