Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19 (NIPS 2006)
Chiara Bartolozzi, Giacomo Indiveri
Selective attention is the strategy used by biological sensory systems to solve the problem of limited parallel processing capacity: salient subregions of the input stimuli are serially processed, while nonsalient regions are suppressed. We present an mixed mode analog/digital Very Large Scale Integration implementation of a building block for a multichip neuromorphic hardware model of selective attention. We describe the chip's architecture and its behavior, when its is part of a multichip system with a spiking retina as input, and show how it can be used to implement in real-time flexible models of bottom-up attention.