University of Texas researchers have developed new biocompatible transistors that mimic brain synapses, an advancement that could help scientists rebuild neural pathways or create brain implants. Though the transistors are not ready for use in humans, the team hopes to use them to create brainlike computers that can work alongside the human brain, said Jean Anne Incorvia, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UT. "There's a big goal in our field of building brain-inspired computers," Incorvia said. "We can imagine that it could seamlessly work alongside a human brain so the human brain is doing processing, and then at some point, it's connected to these (synaptic transistors), which then start doing neuromorphic computer processing with it. So we have this brain-machine combination for doing tasks." The transistors transfer signals in the same way synapses transfer impulses between neurons, co-author Dmitry Kireev said.

Researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stanford University have now fabricated a material for computer components that enable the commercial viability of computers that mimic the human brain. Electrochemical random access (ECRAM) memory components made with 2D titanium carbide showed outstanding potential for complementing classical transistor technology, and contributing toward commercialization of powerful computers that are modeled after the brain's neural network. Such neuromorphic computers can be thousands times more energy efficient than today's computers. These advances in computing are possible because of some fundamental differences from the classic computing architecture in use today, and the ECRAM, a component that acts as a sort of synaptic cell in an artificial neural network, says KTH Associate Professor Max Hamedi. "Instead of transistors that are either on or off, and the need for information to be carried back and forth between the processor and memory -- these new computers rely on components that can have multiple states, and perform in-memory computation," Hamedi says.

MIT engineers have designed a "brain-on-a-chip," smaller than a piece of confetti, that is made from tens of thousands of artificial brain synapses known as memristors -- silicon-based components that mimic the information-transmitting synapses in the human brain. The researchers borrowed from principles of metallurgy to fabricate each memristor from alloys of silver and copper, along with silicon. When they ran the chip through several visual tasks, the chip was able to "remember" stored images and reproduce them many times over, in versions that were crisper and cleaner compared with existing memristor designs made with unalloyed elements. Their results, published today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, demonstrate a promising new memristor design for neuromorphic devices -- electronics that are based on a new type of circuit that processes information in a way that mimics the brain's neural architecture. Such brain-inspired circuits could be built into small, portable devices, and would carry out complex computational tasks that only today's supercomputers can handle.