Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States or FACETS is a European project to research the properties of the human brain.
Established and funded by the European Union in September 2005, the five-year project involves approximately 80 scientists from Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
The main project goal is to address questions about how the brain computes.
Another objective is to create microchip hardware equaling approximately 200,000 neurons with 50 million synapses on a single silicon wafer.
Current prototypes are running 100,000 times faster than their biological counterparts, which would make them the fastest analog computing devices ever built for neuronal computations.