8. Neuromorphic Hardware

Chapter 8

From the computer architect’s perspective, neuromorphic hardware has the potential to shed light on some of the greatest challenges in chip design: thermal management and memory wall. Neuromorphic systems emulate the organization and function of nervous systems. They are comprised of analog and digital electronic circuits, fabricated using the Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technology using Very Large-Scale Integration (VLSI). These neuromorphic systems directly embody the physical processes that underlie the computations of neural systems in their CMOS circuits. Neuromorphic hardware offers a method of exploring neural computation in a medium whose physical behavior is analogous to biological nervous systems and operates in real-time, irrespective of size. This chapter will review the most basic building blocks in neuromorphic electronics and the design of Silicon neurons (SiN).