A Neuromorphic VLSI System for Modeling the Neural Control of Axial Locomotion

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 12 (NIPS 1999)

Bibtex Metadata Paper

Authors

Girish Patel, Edgar Brown, Stephen DeWeerth

Abstract

We have developed and tested an analog/digital VLSI system that mod(cid:173) els the coordination of biological segmental oscillators underlying axial locomotion in animals such as leeches and lampreys. In its current form the system consists of a chain of twelve pattern generating circuits that are capable of arbitrary contralateral inhibitory synaptic coupling. Each pattern generating circuit is implemented with two independent silicon Morris-Lecar neurons with a total of 32 programmable (floating-gate based) inhibitory synapses, and an asynchronous address-event inter(cid:173) connection element that provides synaptic connectivity and implements axonal delay. We describe and analyze the data from a set of experi(cid:173) ments exploring the system behavior in terms of synaptic coupling.