Implementation of Multi-compartment Neuron Model with Synaptic Plasticity Using FPGA

Computational neuroscience is interdisciplinary and plays an essential role in facilitating the development of cognitive neuroscience and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). To explore the computational efficiency of Spiking Neural Network (SNN) on a computational hardware platform, we deploy SNN on the Xilinx Zynq7 Zedboard Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Specifically, we use multi-compartmental Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) neuron model to construct neural circuits via C++ code and adopt a biologically plausible calcium concentration-based plasticity model as the learning rule of SNN. Our experimental results show that the FPGA platform can support parallel computation of the multi-compartment HH model with synaptic plasticity. Compared to other methods, FPGA-based computing has a significant speed advantage, suggesting that FPGA can be a good choice for implementing brain-inspired computation.