Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Circuit Board modeled on Human brain created: Stanford bioengineers



It Could be said one of the biggest success for scientists after they developed a new circuit board modeled on the human brain. The research led by Stanford Scientists could lead the new frontiers in robotics and computing.

" From a pure energy perspective, the brain is hard to match," said Kwabena Boahen, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford.

They developed
an Neurogrid, a circuit board consisting of 16 custom-designed "Neurocore" chips. Togather these 16 chips can simulate 1 million neurons and billions of synaptic connections. These chips designed with power efficiency in mind, their strategy was to enable certain synapses to share hardware circuits. And results Neurogrid - a device that can simulate orders of magnitude more neurons and synapses than other brain mimics on the power it takes to run a tablet computer, the device of an Ipad size.

Boahen said our next target is to lower its cost, and creating complier software that would enable engineers and computer scientists with no knowledge of neuroscience to solve problems- such as contolling a humanoid robot- using Neurogrid.

Further Boahen is working to develop prosthetic limbs for paralyzed people that would be controlled by a Neurocore Chip.

He said we are hopeful to create an neurocompiler so that it could used without knowing how it could work, right now you have to know how the brain works to program one of these.

Boahen further said, much work lies ahead. Now each of the current million-neuron Neurogrid circuit boards costs about $40,000.
He believes dramatic cost reductions are possible. Neurogrid is based on 16 Neurocores, each of which supports 65,536 neurons. Those chips were maid using 15_year old fabrication technologies.
By switching to modern manufacturing processes and fabricating the chips in large volumes, he could cut a Neurocore's cost 100-fold. And could find numerous applications.

The another team of Bioengineers working on developing ways of reading brain signals to understand movement. Boahen envisions a Neurocore-like chip that could be implanted in a paralyzed person's brain, interpreting those intended movements and translating them to commands for prosthetic limbs without overheating the brain.

Currently a small prosthetic arm is controlled by Neurogris to execute movements in real time.
 

The working is still going on possibilities to facilitate it in human welfare at lower costs.
 
We can imagine to treat the dysfunctionality of many Human organs.


Source:
 Stanford University

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