Simulation of brain neurons in real-time using biophysically meaningful models is a prerequisite for comprehensive understanding of how neurons process information and communicate with each other, in effect efficiently complementing in-vivo experiments. State-of-the-art neuron simulators are, however, capable of simulating at most few tens/hundreds of biophysically accurate neurons in real-time due to the exponential growth in the interneuron communication costs with the number of simulated neurons. In this paper, we propose a real-time, reconfigurable, multichip system architecture based on localized communication, which effectively reduces the communication cost to a linear growth. All parts of the system are generated automatically, based on the neuron connectivity scheme. Experimental results indicate that the proposed system architecture allows the capacity of over 3000 to 19 200 (depending on the connectivity scheme) biophysically accurate neurons over multiple chips. ... Read more

For comprehensive understanding of how neurons communicate with each other, new tools need to be developed that can accurately mimic the behaviour of such neurons and neuron networks under `real-time' constraints. In this paper, we propose an easily customisable, highly pipelined, neuron network design, which executes optimally scheduled floating-point operations for maximal amount of biophysically plausible neurons per FPGA family type. To reduce the required amount of resources without adverse effect on the calculation latency, a single exponent instance is used for multiple neuron calculation operations. Experimental results indicate that the proposed network design allows the simulation of up to 1188 neurons on Virtex7 (XC7VX550T) device in brain real-time yielding a speed-up of x12.4 compared to the state-of-the art. ... Read more