DocumentCode :
2894991
Title :
Towards an “early neural circuit simulator”: A FPGA implementation of processing in the rat whisker system
Author :
Leung, Brian ; Pan, Yan ; Schroeder, Chris ; Memik, Seda O. ; Memik, Gokhan ; Hartmann, Mitra JZ
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL
fYear :
2008
fDate :
8-10 Sept. 2008
Firstpage :
191
Lastpage :
196
Abstract :
We have constructed a FPGA-based ldquoearly neural circuit simulatorrdquo 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 ratpsilas 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 II 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.
Keywords :
circuit simulation; field programmable gate arrays; neural nets; Cyclone II FPGA; FPGA implementation; early neural circuit simulator; feed-forward signal; neurons; radial distance; rat brain; rat whisker system; software implementation; stimulus encoding; tactile input; Application software; Brain modeling; Circuit simulation; Computational modeling; Encoding; Feature extraction; Field programmable gate arrays; Predictive models; Rats; Shape;
fLanguage :
English
Publisher :
ieee
Conference_Titel :
Field Programmable Logic and Applications, 2008. FPL 2008. International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Heidelberg
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-1960-9
Electronic_ISBN :
978-1-4244-1961-6
Type :
conf
DOI :
10.1109/FPL.2008.4629930
Filename :
4629930
Link To Document :
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