page_title: SyNAPSE
hierarchical_section_title: SyNAPSE
caption_attribution_description: A circuit board with 16 of the new brain-inspired chips in a 4×4 array along with interface hardware. The board is being used to rapidly analyze high-resolution images. DARPA-funded researchers have developed one of the world’s largest and most complex computer chips ever produced—one whose architecture is inspired by the neuronal structure of the brain and requires only a fraction of the electrical power of conventional chips. Designed by researchers at IBM in San Jose, California, under DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) program, the chip has more than five billion transistors and boasts more than 250 million “synapses,” or programmable logic points, analogous to the connections between neurons in the brain. That’s still orders of magnitude fewer than the number of actual synapses in the brain, but a giant step toward making ultra-high performance, low-power neuro-inspired systems a reality. Many tasks that people and animals perform effortlessly, such as perception and pattern recognition, audio processing and motor control, are difficult for traditional computing architectures to do without consuming a lot of power. Biological systems consume much less energy than current computers attempting the same tasks. The SyNAPSE program was created to speed the development of a brain-inspired chip that could perform difficult perception and control tasks while at the same time achieving significant energy savings. The SyNAPSE-developed chip, which can be tiled to create large arrays, has one million electronic “neurons” and 256 million electronic synapses between neurons. Built on Samsung Foundry's 28nm process technology, the 5.4 billion transistor chip has one of the highest transistor counts of any chip ever produced. Each chip consumes less than 100 milliWatts of electrical power during operation. When applied to benchmark tasks of pattern recognition, the new chip achieved two orders of magnitude in energy savings compared to state-of-the-art traditional computing systems. A technical paper on the chip is available at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6197/668.full
context_page_description: SyNAPSE is a DARPA program that aims to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology, an attempt to build a new kind of cognitive computer with form, function, and architecture similar to the mammalian brain. Such artificial brains would be used in robots whose intelligence would scale with the size of the neural system in terms of total number of neurons and synapses and their connectivity.
  SyNAPSE is a backronym standing for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics. The name alludes to synapses, the junctions between biological neurons. The program is being undertaken by HRL Laboratories, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM Research. In November 2008, IBM and its collaborators were awarded $4.9 million in funding from DARPA while HRL and its collaborators were awarded $5.9 million in funding from DARPA. For the next phase of the project, DARPA added $16.1 million more to the IBM effort while HRL received an additional $10.7 million. In 2011, DARPA added $21 million more to the IBM project. and an additional $17.9 million to the HRL project. The SyNAPSE team for IBM is led by Dharmendra Modha, manager of IBM's cognitive computing initiative.
context_section_description: SyNAPSE is a DARPA program that aims to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology, an attempt to build a new kind of cognitive computer with form, function, and architecture similar to the mammalian brain.  Such artificial brains would be used in robots whose intelligence would scale with the size of the neural system in terms of total number of neurons and synapses and their connectivity.
  SyNAPSE is a backronym standing for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics. The name alludes to synapses, the junctions between biological neurons. The program is being undertaken by HRL Laboratories (HRL), Hewlett-Packard, and IBM Research.  In November 2008, IBM and its collaborators were awarded $4.9 million in funding from DARPA while HRL and its collaborators were awarded $5.9 million in funding from DARPA.  For the next phase of the project, DARPA added $16.1 million more to the IBM effort while HRL received an additional $10.7 million. In 2011, DARPA added $21 million more to the IBM project. and an additional $17.9 million to the HRL project. The SyNAPSE team for IBM is led by Dharmendra Modha, manager of IBM's cognitive computing initiative. The SyNAPSE team for HRL is led by Narayan Srinivasa, manager of HRL's Center for Neural and Emergent Systems.
  The initial phase of the SyNAPSE program developed nanometer scale electronic synaptic components capable of adapting the connection strength between two neurons in a manner analogous to that seen in biological systems (Hebbian learning), and simulated the utility of these synaptic components in core microcircuits that support the overall system architecture.
  Continuing efforts will focus on hardware development through the stages of microcircuit development, fabrication process development, single chip system development, and multi-chip system development. In support of these hardware developments, the program seeks to develop increasingly capable architecture and design tools, very large-scale computer simulations of the neuromorphic electronic systems to inform the designers and validate the hardware prior to fabrication, and virtual environments for training and testing the simulated and hardware neuromorphic systems.
caption: A circuit board with a 4×4 array of SyNAPSE-developed chips. Each chip has one million electronic “neurons” and 256 million electronic synapses between neurons. Built on 28nm process technology, the 5.4 billion transistor chip has one of the highest transistor counts of any chip ever produced as of 2014[update].
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