Abstract

The field of neuromorphic engineering aims to understand and mimic biological organisational principles in order to build hardware with efficiency and performance of animal nervous systems. In this talk, we will look into the concept of neuromodulation as an important control mechanism of neural systems and discuss how it can be replicated in simplified neuromorphic circuits. We will start by highlighting the essential feedback structure of excitable systems and show how complex neural dynamics and its modulation can be broken down into four basic feedback loops. We will then show how this feedback structure can be retained in a simplified circuit modelling framework. This architecture allows us to characterise the behaviour of the circuit through its input-output properties in the form of I-V curves in a few distinct timescales. We will show how modulation of the feedback loops shapes these I-V curves, and in turn, captures the transition between different neural oscillating regimes. The circuit structure can be easily synthesised using well-known neuromorphic building blocks which we will introduce and discuss in the talk. Finally, we will consider how the control of neural excitability properties can be utilised in simple network settings.