An introduction to silicon neural analogs

Abstract

Synthetic neural systems that operate in real time have been fabricated using analog complementary metal-oxide- semiconductor (CMOS) very large scale integration (VLSI) technology. The analog silicon system surpasses the computational power of a general-purpose digital computer because, from device physics to circuit architecture, its form parallels the functional organization of the neural system. Because the CMOS circuit represents neural processing directly in hardware, it is not simply a simulation tool but rather an analog neural system that is embedded in, and interacts with, the real world.