BAD HARDWARE WEEK

In perhaps the boldest presentation at ISPD, keynote speaker Louis Scheffer, a former Cadence Design Systems Inc. Fellow who is now at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, proposed adapting EDA tools to model the human brain. Scheffer described the similarities and differences between the functions of VLSI circuitry and biological neural networks, pointing out that the brain is like a smart sensor network with both analog and digital behaviors that can be modeled with EDA.

First human brain map.