MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Fall 2000 Catalogue Supplement

6.973 Biologically Inspired Electronics (H)

WF 11-12:30, Room 38-136
Prof. Rahul Sarpeshkar, Room 38-294, x8-6599
Prereq.: 6.301, 6.003, 6.002 or permission of instructor
3-0-9

Qualifies as a subject in the Device, Circuits and Systems Engineering Concentration

Analog circuits for biologically inspired systems, bionic systems, ultra low power sensory systems and neural systems. Device physics of the MOS transistor including noise characteristics. Low noise, low power analog circuit design. The use of subthreshold MOS operation in emulating neurobiological hardware. Building-block circuits for sensory system design including transconductance amplifiers. C-G filters, adaptive photoreceptors, and pulsatile neuron circuits. Biophysics of the inner ear or cochlea and the design of an analog low-power silicon cochlea. Applications of the silicon cochlea to bionic speech processors for the deaf. Comparison of the pros and cons of analog vs digital computation. Pulsatile hybrid analog-digital computation with neurons. Hybrid state machines as an extension of finite state machines to the hybrid domain. Applications of hybrid state machines to pulsatile analog to digital conversion. Overview of pulsatile computation in the human brain.