Nearly every industry and sector include engineers, a profession that can generally be thought of as professional creators. Common, traditional specialties include electrical, mechanical, civil, structural, and architectural engineering. There are, however, a variety of engineering subdisciplines that utilize various facets of traditional engineering, such as aerospace engineering, but combine mechanical and electrical engineering with physics.
One of the newest sub-fields is neuromorphic engineering, which combines electrical, computer, and mechanical engineering with biology, physics, and neuroscience. Neuromorphic engineering is already being explored in industries around the world, with broad goals and implications for the future of computing and human development.
Neuromorphic engineering vs. neuromorphic computing
In another article that discusses neuromorphic computing, we discussed neuromorphic computing, a subset of computer engineering dedicated to structuring hardware to handle processing loads in a similar structure to what the human brain does. Most often, neuromorphic engineering systems utilize VLSI (very-large-scale integration) systems to mimic the neurological architecture of the human nervous system.
While neuromorphic computing is limited to the ‘thinking’ aspect of the brain, similar to a neuromorphic AI system, neuromorphic engineering encapsulates recreating the entire ‘nervous system’ that would be found in neuromorphic devices, including sensing, actuating, and other tactile actions. However, a majority of the focus in the field of neuromorphic engineering can be found on the brain side, as the brain is the most complex and unknown aggregate of the nervous system.
Future of neuromorphic engineering
Neuromorphic engineering has, somewhat surprisingly, aided in an analog reawakening of analog computing in the electronics and computing world, because it demands development in both the neural and sensory aspects of neuroscience. Analog electronics were quickly shrouded by the impact of the digital era, and processors of all shapes and sizes rely on digital processing techniques. However, the growth of neuromorphic computing and engineering has prodded researchers, companies, and scientists to search for analog alternatives for historically digital applications, and to re-develop existing analog technology through the new neuromorphic engineering lens.
Neuromorphic engineering is still in its infancy, yet its influence on the future of electronics and computing has already been profound. Companies such as Intel, IBM and Google have dedicated vast resources to push the boundaries of neuromorphic engineering strategies in an effort to realize computing architecture revolutions. In their eyes, the most hopeful reward of neuromorphic engineering is likely a perfectly sentient model of the human brain, and ultimately the entire nervous system, that would exist in a nearly human robot.
Neuromorphic computing architecture
However, in the more realistic short term, neuromorphic engineering yields new knowledge of computational architectures, such as understanding neural plasticity in software, or even a complete renaissance of traditional computing.
As it sits between your ears, your brain is capable of learning, adapting, understanding and inferring infinitely better than even the most complex VLSI neuromorphic systems. In its current state, neuromorphic engineering exists entirely to help computer scientists and neurologists mutually understand their fields in new ways and challenge the status quo of each existing understanding.