Reconfigurable Digital/Analog Processor Array for the Simulation of Gene Regulatory Networks

Simulating gene regulatory networks can be very computationally intensive, especially with complex models and large systems. Simple custom circuits, built from passive and active semiconductor devices, can be used to efficiently model and simulate complex networks using a mix of analog and digital computation. Here we present and demonstrate a prototype of an efficient platform which combines a general FPGA architecture with fairly simple, specialized and configurable computational elements. We show how the prototype can be configured to simulate two simple example networks.