You can’t keep a good engineer down, and the peripatetic Federico Faggin – founder of Zilog Corp – has resurfaced again, this time as co-founder of Synaptics Inc in San Jose, California. Synaptics, as its name suggests, is into the hot new computing science of neural networks, but Faggin’s partner this time around is a California Institute of Technology computer science professor, Carver Mead, who believes that the key to artificial intelligence is to mimic the way sensory stimuli are processed in sentient beings. A key to Mead’s approach, according to the New York Times, is a 1959 Massachusetts Institute of Technology paper, What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain, which reported the finding that the retina of the eye does not simply send a snapshot of what it sees to the brain, but preprocesses the image, rearranges it, and sends only what is useful to the brain. Among the functions it performs is compensating for light levels. Another is comparing points in an image to their neighbouring points to detect edges of objects. A third is detection of motion. Mead has developed a basic chip that performs some of the same functions as the retina and has started work on a similar project to mimic in Silicon the working of the cochlea or inner ear. His Silicon Retina follows the motion of a moving fan – but can’t see it if it is stationary. The circuits mark a return to the early days of the computer when digital and analogue computing vied for supremacy – they are in general analogue. While following the general direction of neural network research, emulating the operation of vertebrate brains, Synaptics also intends to couple it with Mead’s pre-processing approach.
