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Someday a silicon chip might be able to replace defective portions of the human brain or nervous system, because of the work of Ted Berger and John Granacki. "We've done all the pieces of the problem, and now we are trying to fit them together," said Berger, director of the Center for Neural Engineering at the University of Southern California.
Berger's team first stimulated a slice of a rat's brain with a random-signal generator to determine its functional patterns and develop mathematical models representing them. The group then coded those models into an analog chip.
"But if you are going to need tens or hundreds of thousands of neuron models on a chip, analog capacitor models won't scale well," said Berger.
"We're now looking at an SoC [system-on-chip] approach that mixes digital and analog techniques," said Granacki, a silicon engineer who is also the director of the advanced-systems division at USC's Information Science Institute.
Finding a way to attach chips to neurons is another problem. "We are working with chemists and materials scientists to figure out how to coat interface devices with biological or biological-like material that will attract neurons," said Berger.
This sort of neural engineering could lead to cures for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, and find a host of still-unknown applications where computers and brains intersect. "I can't tell what the real applications are yet, but it could be important both for computing and medicine," said Peter Fromherz, a professor of neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry (Munich, Germany). Fromherz has grown neurons directly on a 2-D transistor array supplied by Infineon Technologies.
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