Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have designed a chip that imitates the way the brain processes information.

The chip was made from tens of thousands of artificial synapses called ‘memristors’, which are silicon-based components that mimic the information-transmitting synapses in the human brain

The team said that this work is a promising new design for neuromorphic devices, which are electronics that process information in a way similar to the brain and allow such a chip to perform complex tasks that normally require a supercomputer.

“So far, artificial synapse networks exist as software. We’re trying to build real neural network hardware for portable artificial intelligence systems,” said Jeehwan Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “Imagine connecting a neuromorphic device to a camera on your car, and having it recognise lights and objects and make a decision immediately, without having to connect to the internet. We hope to use energy-efficient memristors to do those tasks on-site, in real-time.”

The researchers borrowed from principles of metallurgy to fabricate each memristor from alloys of silver and copper, along with silicon. When they ran the chip through several visual tasks, the chip was able to “remember” stored images and reproduce them many times over, in versions that were crisper and cleaner compared with existing memristor designs made with unalloyed elements.

The paper was published in Nature Nanotechnology.