Keynote Talk 3

Nature is a great analog and digital circuit designer. She has innovated circuits in the biochemical, biomechanical, and bioelectronic domains that operate very robustly with highly imprecise parts and with incredibly low levels of power. I will discuss how analog and bio-inspired circuits and architectures have led to and are leading to novel architectures in sensing and computing, e.g., in ear-inspired radios, architectures for improving operation in noise, neuron-inspired signal-to-symbol conversion, and hybrid analog-digital architectures that are inspired by computations within cells. Such techniques can lead to highly energy-efficient parallel architectures that operate rapidly and precisely and solve computationally intensive tasks. I will provide examples from systems built in my lab for bionic ear processors for the deaf, brain-machine interfaces for the blind and paralyzed, body sensor networks for cardiac monitoring, and in circuits for systems and synthetic biology.