A Digital Neuromorphic Circuit for Neural-Glial Interaction

Astrocyte as one of the brain cells controls synaptic activity between neurons by providing feedback to neurons. A novel digital hardware is proposed for neuron-synapse-astrocyte network based on the biological Adaptive Exponential (AdEx) neuron and Postnov astrocyte cell model. The network can be used for implementation of large scale spiking neural networks. Synthesis of the designed circuits shows that the designed astrocyte circuit is able to imitate its biological model and regulate the synapse transmission, successfully. In addition, synthesis results confirms that the proposed design uses less than 1% of available resources of a VIRTEX II FPGA which saves up to 4.4% of FPGA resources in comparison to other designs.

星形胶质细胞作为脑细胞之一，通过向神经元提供反馈来控制神经元之间的突触活动。基于生物自适应指数（AdEx）神经元和波斯诺夫星形胶质细胞模型，提出了一种用于神经元 - 突触 - 星形胶质细胞网络的新型数字硬件。该网络可用于实现大规模脉冲神经网络。所设计电路的综合表明，所设计的星形胶质细胞电路能够成功模拟其生物模型并调节突触传递。此外，综合结果证实，所提出的设计使用了VIRTEX II FPGA不到1%的可用资源，与其他设计相比，节省了高达4.4%的FPGA资源。