A digital neuromorphic circuit for neural-glial interaction

Astrocyte as one of the brain cells controls synaptic activity between neurons by providing feedback to neurons. A novel digital hardware is proposed for neuron-synapse-astrocyte network based on the biological Adaptive Exponential (AdEx) neuron and Postnov astrocyte cell model. The network can be used for implementation of large scale spiking neural networks. Synthesis of the designed circuits shows that the designed astrocyte circuit is able to imitate its biological model and regulate the synapse transmission, successfully. In addition, synthesis results confirms that the proposed design uses less than 1% of available resources of a VIRTEX II FPGA which saves up to 4.4% of FPGA resources in comparison to other designs.