In this chapter, authors present the novel employment of swarm intelligence in the constraint design of spiking neurons and synapses for advanced and technology agnostic sensor signal conditioning and conversion. Manual design activities, leading to proof-of-principle circuits and a first chip, are used as specifications and baseline for the optimized designs pursued in our correspondingly extended ABSYNTH design environment.

Chapter Contents:

• Abstract
• 15.1 Introduction
• 15.2 State of the art
• 15.3 ABSYNTH architecture and nonlinear circuit synthesis
• 15.4 Neuromorphic spiking circuits and systems
• 15.4.1 Sensor-to-spike-to-digital-converter
• 15.4.2 Cost function design
• 15.5 Optimization algorithms
• 15.6 Experiments and results
• 15.6.1 Results
• 15.7 Statistical analysis
• 15.7.1 Design centering (DC) for adaptive circuits
• 15.7.2 Design centering (DC) for evolvable hardware
• 15.8 Conclusion
• References

Inspec keywords: swarm intelligence; sensors; neurophysiology; neural nets; public domain software

Other keywords: manual design activities; spiking neurons; swarm intelligence; optimized designs; constraint design; ABSYNTH design environment; neural systems synthesis; synapses; technology agnostic sensor signal conditioning

Subjects: Neural nets (theory)