Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, September 29, 2003 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Rahul Sarpeshkar

"Biologically Inspired Electronics"

ABSTRACT -- Neurobiological systems use impressively few resources of energy, space, and time to solve complex sensory and sensorimotor tasks. An important reason for such efficiency is the clever use of nonlinear, adaptive, distributed, and hybrid analog-digital computational strategies. First, I will describe ongoing research on building high performance, ultra-low-power silicon chips inspired by the biological cochlea. Such chips have applications in various domains where spectral analysis in noisy environments is essential, such as in bionic implants for the deaf or in speech recognition. I will demonstrate an application from this research, an all-analog, soon-to-go-commercial bionic ear processor with such low power consumption that a conventional A-D-then-DSP technique will not be able to beat it two decades in the future. I will describe why the optimal strategy for efficient computation is likely to be a hybrid mixture of analog and digital computation. I will outline research on building energy-efficient architectures that are inspired by pulsatile analog-digital representations in the brain's neurons. I conclude by summarizing the promise of biologically inspired electronics and outlining applications in other domains such as machine vision and robotics.

SPEAKER -- Rahul Sarpeshkar obtained Bachelor's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics at MIT. After completing his PhD at Caltech, he joined Bell Labs as a member of the technical staff. Since 1999, he has been on the faculty of MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department where he heads a research group on Analog VLSI and Biological Systems, and is currently the Robert J. Shillman Associate Professor. He has received several awards including the Packard Fellow award given to outstanding young faculty, the ONR Young Investigator Award, and the NSF Career Award. He was recently awarded the Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching at MIT. He holds over a dozen patents and has authored several publications including one that was featured on the cover of NATURE. His research interests include analog and mixed-signal VLSI, ultra low power circuits and systems, biologically inspired circuits and systems, and control theory.