Event-Based Neuromorphic Systems


Book Description

Neuromorphic electronic engineering takes its inspiration from the functioning of nervous systems to build more power efficient electronic sensors and processors. Event-based neuromorphic systems are inspired by the brain's efficient data-driven communication design, which is key to its quick responses and remarkable capabilities. This cross-disciplinary text establishes how circuit building blocks are combined in architectures to construct complete systems. These include vision and auditory sensors as well as neuronal processing and learning circuits that implement models of nervous systems. Techniques for building multi-chip scalable systems are considered throughout the book, including methods for dealing with transistor mismatch, extensive discussions of communication and interfacing, and making systems that operate in the real world. The book also provides historical context that helps relate the architectures and circuits to each other and that guides readers to the extensive literature. Chapters are written by founding experts and have been extensively edited for overall coherence. This pioneering text is an indispensable resource for practicing neuromorphic electronic engineers, advanced electrical engineering and computer science students and researchers interested in neuromorphic systems. Key features: Summarises the latest design approaches, applications, and future challenges in the field of neuromorphic engineering. Presents examples of practical applications of neuromorphic design principles. Covers address-event communication, retinas, cochleas, locomotion, learning theory, neurons, synapses, floating gate circuits, hardware and software infrastructure, algorithms, and future challenges.




Sensor Signal and Information Processing II


Book Description

In the current age of information explosion, newly invented technological sensors and software are now tightly integrated with our everyday lives. Many sensor processing algorithms have incorporated some forms of computational intelligence as part of their core framework in problem solving. These algorithms have the capacity to generalize and discover knowledge for themselves and learn new information whenever unseen data are captured. The primary aim of sensor processing is to develop techniques to interpret, understand, and act on information contained in the data. The interest of this book is in developing intelligent signal processing in order to pave the way for smart sensors. This involves mathematical advancement of nonlinear signal processing theory and its applications that extend far beyond traditional techniques. It bridges the boundary between theory and application, developing novel theoretically inspired methodologies targeting both longstanding and emergent signal processing applications. The topic ranges from phishing detection to integration of terrestrial laser scanning, and from fault diagnosis to bio-inspiring filtering. The book will appeal to established practitioners, along with researchers and students in the emerging field of smart sensors processing.




Synaptic Plasticity for Neuromorphic Systems


Book Description

One of the most striking properties of biological systems is their ability to learn and adapt to ever changing environmental conditions, tasks and stimuli. It emerges from a number of different forms of plasticity, that change the properties of the computing substrate, mainly acting on the modification of the strength of synaptic connections that gate the flow of information across neurons. Plasticity is an essential ingredient for building artificial autonomous cognitive agents that can learn to reliably and meaningfully interact with the real world. For this reason, the neuromorphic community at large has put substantial effort in the design of different forms of plasticity and in putting them to practical use. These plasticity forms comprise, among others, Short Term Depression and Facilitation, Homeostasis, Spike Frequency Adaptation and diverse forms of Hebbian learning (e.g. Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity). This special research topic collects the most advanced developments in the design of the diverse forms of plasticity, from the single circuit to the system level, as well as their exploitation in the implementation of cognitive systems.




Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems


Book Description

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems, Living Machines 2017, held in Stanford, CA, USA, in July 2017.The 42 full and 19 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. The theme of the conference encompasses biomimetic methods for manufacture, repair and recycling inspired by natural processes such as reproduction, digestion, morphogenesis and metamorphosis.







Bio-inspired Audio Processing, Models and Systems


Book Description

Neurophysiology and biology provide useful starting points to help us understand and build better audio processing systems. The papers in this special issue address hardware implementations, spiking networks, sound identification, and attention decoding.




Synaptic Circuits and Functions in Bio-inspired Integrated Architectures


Book Description

Based upon the most advanced human-made technology on this planet, CMOS integrated circuit technology, this dissertation examines the design of hardware components and systems to establish a technological foundation for the application of future breakthroughs in the intersection of AI and neuroscience. Humans have long imagined machines, robots, and computers that learn and display intelligence akin to animals and themselves. To advance the development of these machines, specialised research in custom-built hardware designed for specific types of computation, which mirrors the structure of powerful biological nervous systems, is especially important. This dissertation is driven by the quest to harness biological and artificial neural principles to enhance the efficiency, adaptability, and intelligence of electronic neurosynaptic and neuromorphic hardware systems. It investigates the hardware design of bio-inspired neural components and their integration into more extensive scale and efficient chip architectures suitable for edge processing and near-sensor environments. Exploring all steps to the creation of a custom chip, this work selectively surveys and advances the state-of-the-art in bio-inspired mixed-signal subthreshold integrated design for neurosynaptic systems in a practical fashion. Further, it presents a novel asynchronous digital convolutional neuronal network processing pipeline integrated with a vision sensor for smart sensing. In conclusion, it sets forth a series of open challenges and future directions for the field, emphasizing the need for a robust, future-proof base for bio-inspired design and the potential of asynchronous stream processor architectures.




Neuromorphic Engineering Systems and Applications


Book Description

Neuromorphic engineering has just reached its 25th year as a discipline. In the first two decades neuromorphic engineers focused on building models of sensors, such as silicon cochleas and retinas, and building blocks such as silicon neurons and synapses. These designs have honed our skills in implementing sensors and neural networks in VLSI using analog and mixed mode circuits. Over the last decade the address event representation has been used to interface devices and computers from different designers and even different groups. This facility has been essential for our ability to combine sensors, neural networks, and actuators into neuromorphic systems. More recently, several big projects have emerged to build very large scale neuromorphic systems. The Telluride Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop (since 1994) and the CapoCaccia Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop (since 2009) have been instrumental not only in creating a strongly connected research community, but also in introducing different groups to each other’s hardware. Many neuromorphic systems are first created at one of these workshops. With this special research topic, we showcase the state-of-the-art in neuromorphic systems.




Memristors and Memristive Systems


Book Description

This book provides a comprehensive overview of current research on memristors, memcapacitors and, meminductors. In addition to an historical overview of the research in this area, coverage includes the theory behind memristive circuits, as well as memcapacitance, and meminductance. Details are shown for recent applications of memristors for resistive random access memories, neuromorphic systems and hybrid CMOS/memristor circuits. Methods for the simulation of memristors are demonstrated and an introduction to neuromorphic modeling is provided.




Panoramic Vision


Book Description

This book features representative work in the design of panoramic image capturing systems, the theory involved in the imaging process, and applications that use panoramic images. This book allows the reader to understand the more technical aspects of panoramic vision, such as sensor design and imaging techniques. Researchers and students especially will find this book useful.