Efficient Implementation of Spontaneous Calcium Oscillations in the Central Nervous System on Reconfigurable Digital Boards

Abstract

Biological systems in case of real-time state and also large-scale simulation approach are interesting and challenge-based due to different aspects of nonlinear mathematical modeling that can describe the interactions of biological blocks. Thus, hardware circuit designing of these basic blocks in the Central Nervous System (CNS) can be an important field in case of achieving high performance neuromorphic system emulator. This paper presents a high-speed, low-cost, and efficient digital circuit for emulating the plausible calcium-dynamic-based model of astrocyte which has spontaneous oscillations. The nonlinear high-cost functions of the complex astrocyte model are reformulated using the power-2 based low-cost terms using optimized exhaustive search algorithm. Subsequently, the proposed model is simulated in case of validating the presented model and new optimized functions. Finally, the proposed model is physically realized in hardware case using Virtex 4 FPGA platform to test and validate final circuits. FPGA implementation results confirmed the ability of the design to emulate biological cell behaviours in detail with high accuracy. The proposed hardware consumes maximum 2% of the all resources of a Virtex 4 board. Additionally, timing analysis and synthesize report represent that the proposed model works in a high frequency of 371.56 MHz. Moreover, to validate the results of implementation, the proposed model is compared with the original model and other similar works in terms of accuracy, speed-up, and maximum number of implemented astrocyte.