Paper Info
Title
Towards An "Early Neural Circuit Simulator": A Fpga Implementation Of Processing In The Rat Whisker System
Abstract
We have constructed a FPGA-based "early neural circuit simulator" to model the first two stages of stimulus encoding and processing in the rat whisker system. Rats use tactile input from their whiskers to extract object features such as size and shape. We use the simulator to examine the plausibility of the hypothesis that neural circuits in the rat's brain compute gradients of radial distance across the whisker array to make predictions about the environment. This prediction could be a component of a feed-forward signal that guides the navigation behavior of the rat. The use of a FPGA is highly suitable for such an application, because the computation involved in this system is a massively parallel problem. For our applications, we determined that a Cyclone 11 FPGA could simulate up to 14 neurons in parallel in just 265 ns achieving a 386-fold speedup over the software implementation of the same model.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1109/FPL.2008.4629930
2008 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON FIELD PROGRAMMABLE AND LOGIC APPLICATIONS, VOLS 1 AND 2
Keywords
Field
DocType
feed forward,mathematical model,predictive models,computational modeling,radial distance,neural nets,field programmable gate arrays
Computer science,Massively parallel,Parallel computing,Field-programmable gate array,Artificial neural network,Computer hardware,Biological neural network,Electronic circuit simulation,Speedup,Computation,Embedded system,Encoding (memory)
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1946-1488
2
0.47
References 
Authors
2
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Brian Leung120.47
Yan Pan2708.51
Chris Schroeder320.47
Seda Öǧrenci Memik448842.57
Gokhan Memik51694111.88
Mitra J. Z. Hartmann6262.86