Brain on a chip

MIT engineers have designed a “brain-on-a-chip,” smaller than a piece of confetti, made from tens of thousands of artificial synapses known as memristors—silicon-based components that can produce and remember signals of varying strength rather than just 1 and 0, thus carrying out a wider range of operations than conventional transistors.
Led by Jeehwan Kim, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, the researchers borrowed from principles of metallurgy to fabricate each memristor from alloys of silver and copper, along with silicon. When tested on several visual tasks, the chip was able to “remember” stored images and reproduce them many times over, in versions that were crisper and cleaner than results achieved by existing memristor designs made with unalloyed elements.
Their results demonstrate promise for neuromorphic devices—electronics based on a new type of circuit that processes information in a way inspired by the human brain. Such circuits could be built into small, portable devices, and would carry out complex computational tasks that today only supercomputers can handle.
“So far, artificial synapse networks exist as software. We’re trying to build real neural-network hardware for portable artificial-intelligence systems,” says Kim. “Imagine connecting a neuromorphic device to a camera on your car, and having it recognize lights and objects and make a decision immediately.” He adds, “Someday you might be able to carry around artificial brains to do these kinds of tasks, without connecting to supercomputers, the internet, or the cloud.”
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like.
New large language models will transform many jobs. Whether they will lead to widespread prosperity or not is up to us.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
GPT-4 is bigger and better than ChatGPT—but OpenAI won’t say why
We got a first look at the much-anticipated big new language model from OpenAI. But this time how it works is even more deeply under wraps.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.