Opportunities for neuromorphic computing algorithms and applications - Nature Computational Science

With the end of Moore's law approaching and Dennard scaling ending, the computing community is increasingly looking at new technologies to enable continued performance improvements. Neuromorphic computers are one such new computing technology. The term neuromorphic was coined by Carver Mead in the late 1980s1,2, and at that time primarily referred to mixed analogue–digital implementations of brain-inspired computing; however, as the field has continued to evolve and with the advent of large-scale funding opportunities for brain-inspired computing systems such as the DARPA Synapse project and the European Union's Human Brain Project, the term neuromorphic has come to encompass a wider variety of hardware implementations. We define neuromorphic computers as non-von Neumann computers whose structure and function are inspired by brains and that are composed of neurons and synapses. Von Neumann computers are composed of separate CPUs and memory units, where data and instructions are stored in the latter.