Neurogrid

Neurogrid is a piece of computer hardware that is designed specifically for simulation of biological brains.

It uses analog computation to emulate ion channel activity, and digital communication to softwire structured connectivity patterns.

Neurogrid simulates one million neurons[1] and six billion synapses in real time.

Neurogrid was designed and built by the Brains in Silicon group at Stanford University, led by Kwabena Boahen.

With 61 graded and 18 binary programmable parameters, common to all of its silicon neurons, a Neurocore can model a variety of spiking and interaction patterns.

With sixteen 12x14 sq-mm chips (Neurocores) assembled on a 6.5x7.5 sq-in circuit board (shown above), Neurogrid can model a slab of cortex with up to 16x256x256 neurons. The chips are interconnected in a binary tree by 80M spike/sec links. An on-chip RAM (in each Neurocore) and an off-chip RAM (on a daughterboard, not shown) softwire vertical and horizontal cortical connections, respectively.