NAM for Massive Neuronal Assembly

The title #NAM stands for Parallel SImulation (PSI) for Neuronal Assembly Model(NAM). An instruction driven NAM processor [1] architecture had been proposed to model a complex stochastic neuronal assembly, capable of modeling a wide class of neuronal models including the stochastic model proposed in [2]. However, modeling the neuronal assembly using this processor will be computationally ine#cient as it does not include special functional units to model the signal processing characteristics of complex dendritic tree structure. This paper proposes two processor architectures: one based on mixed signal approach - the Mixed signal NAM (MNAM) processor,and the other based on digital approach - the Digital Dendritic NAM (DDNAM) processor. In reality, modeling the complex brain functions and its fault simulation demands enormous computational resources beyond the number crunching capability of either a single MNAM or a single DDNAM processor. The companion paper, Part-II proposes a novel array architecture to meet this end