A spiking VLSI selective attention multi–chip system with dynamic synapses and integrate-and-fire neurons

Selective attention is the strategy used by biological sensory systems to solve the problem of limited parallel processing capacity: salient subregions of the input stimuli are serially processed, while non–salient regions are suppressed. We present an mixed mode analog/digital Very Large Scale Integration implementation of a building block for a multi–chip neuromorphic hardware model of selective attention. We describe the chip’s architecture and its behavior, when its is part of a multi–chip system with a spiking retina as input, and show how it can be used to implement in real-time flexible models of bottom-up attention.