Concept
Energy efficiency
Work done per joule spent. The brain runs on roughly 20 watts, which is the benchmark that makes most computing hardware look profligate — and a hard ceiling for anything implanted.
From the EE side
From the neuro side
Efficiency is the constraint that makes the two directions of this site meet most sharply. Implanted electronics must respect a thermal budget set by tissue; neuromorphic designers chase a power budget set by biology.
Nearby concepts
All topics under Energy efficiency
- Neuropixels probes 2017 A CMOS shank carrying nearly a thousand recording sites with the amplifiers and multiplexers on the probe itself, which made recording hundreds of neurons at once routine.
- Cochlear implants 1991 An electrode array in the cochlea driven by a filter bank, which restores speech understanding using a couple of dozen channels where the ear has thousands.
- Neuromorphic computing 1990 Building computation from analog devices in their physics-limited regimes and from spikes rather than clocked arithmetic, on the argument that the brain's efficiency comes from its style of computing.
- The silicon retina 1988 Analog VLSI built to copy the retina's habit of reporting change rather than absolute brightness, which is the ancestor of every event camera shipping today.
- Transcranial magnetic stimulation 1985 Discharging a capacitor bank through a coil induces enough electric field inside the skull to fire cortical neurons, making non-invasive stimulation of a chosen region possible.
- Efficient coding 1961 The proposal that sensory systems are built to remove redundancy from their input, which turns "why is the retina wired this way" into an information-theory question.
- Cable theory 1959 Treating a dendrite as a leaky transmission line, borrowed from nineteenth-century telegraph engineering, which showed that dendrites compute rather than merely collect.
- The Hodgkin–Huxley model 1952 Circuit theory borrowed to explain the axon as a capacitor with voltage-dependent conductances — then handed back decades later as the template for analog silicon neurons.
- The artificial neuron 1943 Stripping the neuron to a weighted sum and a threshold, which gave engineering a computing element built from biology and is still the unit inside every network built since.
- Programmable stimulation waveforms — Synthesising the stimulus pulse with a modular converter instead of inheriting whatever the output stage rings at, which turns shape and timing into experimental variables.