Achievement

Stephen Brink is doing research in a field called neuromorphic engineering, which involves making integrated circuits (ICs) that emulate the electrical behavior of neurons in the brain. Stephen has created an IC that features 100 model neurons with a large array of synapses that can connect the neurons in arbitrary network topologies. This system uses cutting-edge floating-gate technology to overcome the difficulties with semiconductor process variation that plague many neuromorphic circuits. It also is one of the few such systems in existence that has synapses that adapt by way of spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP), which is the neural process that is widely believed to underlie learning in the brain. Stephen has done extensive testing with the above-described IC, and have used it to conduct simulation studies of several neural network topologies.