Abstract

Processors have been experiencing an exponential growth in speed and power consumption for over five decades now thanks to Moore's Law. However, as transistors approach their fundamental physical limits, researchers are on an endeavor for new computational system designs that can circumvent these natural limits and what better computational system to look at than a human's brain? This masterpiece of nature is responsible for all the cognitive tasks of a human being, and recent studies have shown just how incapable our computers are at carrying even a small portion of the brain's tasks. Most of the functionalities of the brain remain a mystery, but this has not stopped us from applying what is known about the brain to computational systems. In this study, we will be going over the challenges of designing a computational system inspired by the brain and discuss the most promising large-scale systems developed in recent years.