Present and Future Industrial Applications of Bio-Inspired VLSI Systems

Biology can be a rich source of inspiration for engineers. In particular, designers of VLSI processing circuits and systems can draw inspiration from several aspects of the brain. Inspired from evolution, the opportunistic exploitation of all the properties of the technology provides very efficient analog circuit techniques. The collective computation carried out by the brain in its massively parallel architecture can be emulated on silicon. Strategies like learning and adaptation are very beneficial to VLSI processing. The same is true for the unusual ways used by the brain to represent signals and information. Four industrial chips developed with this bio-inspired approach are described, as well as several experimental circuits that demonstrate its potential for future products.