A Novel Hardware-Efficient Ergodic Sequential Logic Neuron Model: Cellular Differentiation Method and Virtual Clinical Trial of Neural Prosthesis

A novel sequential logic neuron model and its cellular differentiation method are presented. It is shown that the differentiation method enables the neuron model to reproduce typical nonlinear responses of a given neuron. Then a virtual clinical trial of neural prosthesis is executed, i.e., a target neuron model in a network of biologically plausible differential equation neuron models is replaced with the presented neuron model that is differentiated to reproduce the target neuron model. It is shown that the prosthesis can recover typical neural behaviors of the network for a wide parameter range and has a generalization ability. The presented neuron model is implemented by a field programmable gate array and the virtual clinical trial is validated by experiments. It is concluded that the presented neuron model has better reproduction ability of neural phenomena and much higher hardware efficiency compared to a commonly used simplified differential equation neuron model.