Randomly spiking dynamic neural fields driven by a shared random flow

Abstract

Dynamic Neural Fields (DNF) is a well studied mean field model introduced by Amari. It is commonly used for high level bioinspired cognitive architecture modeling or as a module for autonomous bio-inspired robotics. In a previous work we studied the feasibility of a purely cellular hardware implementation of this model in a digital substratum. We introduced the randomly spiking dynamic neural fields which successfully reproduced the DNF model’s behavior with local and decentralized computations implemented on FPGA. The lateral synaptic weights are computed with a random propagation of binary information generated with a cellular array of pseudo random number cellular automata. More than half of the area utilization was dedicated to the random numbers generation. In this paper we investigate two ways of reducing the surface of random number generators while keeping a cellular architecture.