THE HOLY GRAIL OF COMPUTING

IN A GIANT LEAP TOWARDS BRAIN-INSPIRED COMPUTING, IISc RESEARCHERS HAVE ENGINEERED A DEVICE THAT PROCESSES INFORMATION LIKE NEURAL SYNAPSES, AND PROMISES A LEAP IN SPEED, ENERGY EFFICIENCY AND DATA SECURITY

- Ajay Sukumaran

On a corner of the Centre for Nano Science and Engineering (CENSE) building inside the serene, leafy environs of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, is a Raman spectroscopy lab-the most silent working space you could ever imagine. Here, acoustic noise is reduced to something lower than a whisper, that is, less than 30 decibels, so that sensitive measurements, like probing the properties of an individual molecule, can be carried out. It's in this place that a breakthrough, one that promises to place India on the global map of computing inventions, was achieved recently. The invention was of a new device-a computing accelerator-that processes data not in the conventional way a microprocessor-the brain of a computer-does. But closer to how an actual human brain would do.

Welcome to the world of neuromorphic, or brain-inspired, computing-an interdisciplinary field that tries to find a meeting point between neuroscience and computer engineering. One of its biggest sources of inspiration is the synapse, the junction located at nerve endings inside a human body where electrical impulses are transmitted between two neurons or between a neuron and a muscle cell. "If you look at the synapse, it can store data in thousands of states between one axon (which transmits a neuron signal) and a dendron (which receives it). So, the question is, if the brain can store data in so many states, why can't electronic devices," says Sreetosh Goswami, principal investigator of a seven-member IISc team that carried out research and development of the accelerator. Their research paper was published in the British weekly scientific journal Nature on September 11.