Physics of Computation

Welcome to Physics of Computation, Carver Mead's group at Caltech. Our group is associated with the Computation and Neural Systems Program. You can see what's new at Physcmp, or you can jump to the resources. We also have links to other sites doing related work or links to sites with lots of other links.

Your (anonymous) comments (and bug reports!) are welcome. Please report missing links. You can also look at a so-far uninteresting log of previous comments.

We design and evaluate neuromorphic analog VLSI chips. Neuromorphic means that we try to get our chips to emulate functions of small pieces of the nervous system, like retinas and cochleas.

We also put a lot of effort into understanding how the physics of transistors lends itself to performing useful analog computation, and how this physics can be used to build new types of devices, say, for adaptation or learning.

There is a great deal of technology that goes into designing and testing these chips. Most of the resources offered here are technological, such as the Chipmunk design tools. We also have some papers online, some with online HTML abstracts with figures, some even with MPEG or QuickTime movies.

We do not fabricate the chips ourselves; we use the ARPA facility MOSIS. You might be interested in seeing the ``el-cheapo'' setup for chip design, and what we actually use to design chips. Also, you might be interested in the setup we use to test chips.

If any groups out there want to be linked here because of some common interest, please tell us.

• Chipmunk VLSI Tools The Chipmunk Tools used at Caltech to design analog VLSI chips. Maintained by John Lazarro.
• Analog VLSI Papers Papers written by various members of Mead's research group.
• CNS 182 Analog VLSI Class The labs and lab handouts from Carver's class on analog VLSI. Maintained by this year's head TA, Brad Minch.
• CNS 184 Analog VLSI Project Class The assignments from the project class accompaning CNS 182. Maintained by the head TA, Jeff Dickson.
• Matlab stuff Utilities, mostly for instrument control via cards (this server is flaky) with Matlab on Macs. Originally developed by Dan Naar of Apple Computer.
• Instructions for building a potbox. Designed and documented by Lloyd Watts (lloyd@pcmp.caltech.edu). Another potbox designed by Tim Edwards and used in Mike Godfrey's group at Stanford is described by him in a paper available here.
• Address-Event communication protocol. Papers and other pointers for users of the address-event chip-to-chip communication protocol.
• Spike and Neuralog. A neural schematic circuit entry system based on the chipmunk tool analog, and a fast event-based simulator. Maintained by Lloyd Watts (lloyd@pcmp.caltech.edu).
• TinyChip analog pads. The analog pads and pad frame that we use for MOSIS TinyChip designs.
• Our setup for using the Tanner tools L-Edit and LVS in conjunction with the Chipmunk tools schematic editor log to design chips using MOSIS' scalable generic technologies.

• Short and fluffy interview with Mead in in Wired.
• ~1 minute Quicktime movie clip of Carver as part of the BBC/Sandlin production Teaching computers to think ( 4MB); or Audio portion only ( 166KB). Both of these require a Quicktime player.
• Quote from George Gilder's Microcosm about Silicon Valley.
• Interview with George Gilder in Wired.
• Carver makes it into Buzz magazine's 100 Coolest People in the LA Area list. A true honor...
• EE Times article on the Synaptics touchpad, which uses NN technology. Another article. (Synaptics is the Silicon valley company founded by Carver and Frederico Faggin that works on transfering analog VLSI NN technology to make commodity devices.)

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