AUTHOR=Niu Chuanxin M. , Nandyala Sirish K. , Sanger Terence D. TITLE=Emulated muscle spindle and spiking afferents validates VLSI neuromorphic hardware as a testbed for sensorimotor function and disease JOURNAL=Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience VOLUME=Volume 8 - 2014 YEAR=2014 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computational-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fncom.2014.00141 DOI=10.3389/fncom.2014.00141 ISSN=1662-5188 ABSTRACT=
The lack of multi-scale empirical measurements (e.g., recording simultaneously from neurons, muscles, whole body, etc.) complicates understanding of sensorimotor function in humans. This is particularly true for the understanding of development during childhood, which requires evaluation of measurements over many years. We have developed a synthetic platform for emulating multi-scale activity of the vertebrate sensorimotor system. Our design benefits from Very Large Scale Integrated-circuit (VLSI) technology to provide considerable scalability and high-speed, as much as 365× faster than real-time. An essential component of our design is the proprioceptive sensor, or muscle spindle. Here we demonstrate an accurate and extremely fast emulation of a muscle spindle and its spiking afferents, which are computationally expensive but fundamental for reflex functions. We implemented a well-known rate-based model of the spindle (Mileusnic et al.,