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JOINT COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING SEMINAR

            VLSI MODELS OF NEURO-NETWORKS
                          by
                Professor Carver Mead
          California Institute of Technology

                       Abstract

     The Semiconductor technology has evolved to  the  point
where  chips  containing a million transistors can be fabri-
cated without defects.  If a small number of defects can  be
tolerated,  this number is increased by two orders of magni-
tude.  Devices now being fabricated on an experimental basis
have  shown  that another two orders of magnitude are possi-
ble.  The inescapable conclusion is that  wafers  containing
10^10  (10 to the tenth power) devices, of which only a van-
ishing fraction are defective, will be in production  within
a  few  years.   This level of complexity is well below that
required for higher cortical functions, but is already  suf-
ficient to solve lower level perception tasks.

     This remarkable technology has made possible a new dis-
cipline: Synthetic Neurobiology.  The thesis of this discip-
line is that it is not possible, even in principle, to claim
a full understanding of a system unless one is able to build
one that functions properly.  This principle is already well
accepted  in  molecular biology, and more recently in genet-
ics.  It is hoped that the approach will soon join the trad-
itional descriptive and analytical foundations of neurobiol-
ogy.

     Small examples using current technology to attack prob-
lems in early vision and hearing will be described.

DATE:	Monday, October 6, 1986
TIME:	4:00 p.m.
PLACE:	GB244
	Galbraith Building
	University of Toronto