By Don Clark 

SAN JOSE, Calif.-- International Business Machines Corp. is claiming a major advance in emulating the brain in silicon.

The technology company has developed a microchip that simulates functions of neurons, synapses and other features of the brain to perform calculations. IBM says the chip, a sharp break from the fundamental design used in most computers, excels at chores like recognizing patterns and classifying objects while using much less electrical power than conventional hardware.

IBM's new chip is the latest in a series of efforts by the company and others to design brain-like chips as traditional chip manufacturing yields fewer dramatic breakthroughs. But its latest offering, described in a paper in the journal Science, has novel features that include its large size and the use of standard digital technology rather than esoteric materials or production processes.

Though it is giving few details on timing, IBM says it is already talking to potential partners about ways to bring the chip to market. The company has connected multiple chips together to test potential system designs, and sees applications of the technology ranging from room-sized supercomputers to floating jellyfish-shaped devices that could sense tsunamis or other aquatic conditions.

"We have huge commercial ambitions," said Dharmendra Modha, a researcher at IBM's Almaden Research Center here whose titles include chief scientist for brain-inspired computing.

The chip, dubbed TrueNorth, was built for IBM by Samsung Electronics Co. using the same manufacturing technology the South Korean company uses to make microprocessors for smartphones and other mobile devices. IBM collaborated on the underlying design with researchers at the New York campus of Cornell University in a project that has received $53 million in funding since 2008 from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

IBM's announcement comes as scientists and engineers are pondering the prospect of slowing improvements of conventional microprocessors. Historically, manufacturers steadily have shrunk chip circuitry, reducing costs while improving calculating speed and reducing power consumption.

But chip manufacturers can no longer rely on traditional processes to produce dramatic improvements, particularly for scientists grappling with supercomputers whose power needs already approach those of small cities. Radically different chip architectures like TrueNorth may help.

"Power is the fundamental constraint as we move forward," says Horst Simon, deputy director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a major supercomputer user. "This chip is an indication that we are really at the threshold of a fundamental change in architecture."

The underlying design used in most computers and microprocessors since the 1940s--named after mathematician John von Neumann--separates components that carry out calculations from memory circuity that stores data. Bits are shuttled between those components through a conduit called a bus, with activity synchronized by an internal clock. The scheme works well for tasks like adding repeated sets of numbers, Mr. Modha said. And chips have become much faster for such jobs as manufacturers have increased the frequency of the clock's timing pulses.

But that trend also tends to boost a chip's power consumption. Moving data back and forth over a bus, meanwhile, tends to slow calculations, he said.

Brains, by contrast, are compact and particularly efficient at chores like recognizing a person's face or distinguishing one sound from another, Mr. Modha said. Cells called neurons process and transmit information that is stored nearby, connected by structures called synapses.

TrueNorth, IBM says, uses 5.4 billion transistors--four times more than a typical PC processor--to yield the equivalent of one million neurons and 256 million synapses. They are organized into 4,096 structures called "neurosynaptic cores," each able to store, process and transmit data to any other using a communications scheme called a crossbar.

The design is "event-driven," Mr. Modha said. That means that individual cores fire up only when they are needed, rather than running all the time.

This scheme makes the chips more power-efficient. Where a comparable standard microprocessor draws 50 to 100 watts per square centimeter, TrueNorth draws just 20 thousandths of a watt, IBM says.

In a demonstration, Mr. Modha showed how the technology used with a video camera atop a building can pick out and track people walking below. Besides daisy-chaining TrueNorth chips to make large systems, IBM expects to distribute a smaller, simpler chip for applications where space is paramount or humans can't easily go. Potential applications described by the company include ball-sized rolling robots with cameras to inspect disaster sites and leaf-sized sensing devices that could be scattered during a forest fire.

"It's not going to replace conventional computers," Mr. Modha says. "It is a complementary relationship."

Other companies, including chip giants Intel Corp. and Qualcomm Inc., have their own designs for what engineers call "neuromorphic" chips. Once working devices have been created, engineers face the equally daunting task of persuding programmers to learn new methods for creating useful software.

IBM has tried to address the obstacles, developing a special programming language and tools to simulate such chips. The technology "is much closer to being useable than a lot of other neuromorphic systems others have developed," said Rajit Manohar, a longtime collaborator who is professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell Tech.

But other experts say it is too early to identify front-runners in the field. One is Jeff Hawkins, a mobile-device pioneer and co-founder of Numenta, a startup has been building hardware and software based on a lengthy study of the brain.

Mr. Hawkins believes that largely two-dimensional chips like TrueNorth will give way to stacks of chips or other approaches that more closely emulate the brain's many connections. It's "a many-year process to find out what the right neural architecture is," he said.

Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com

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