In the 1980s, a microelectronics pioneer called Carver Mead realised that the same transistors used to build silicon chips could be also used to build circuits mimicking the properties of neurons.

"Brains do things in technically and conceptually novel ways -- they can solve rather effortlessly issues which we cannot yet resolve with the largest and most modern digital machines," said Rodney Douglas, a professor at the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich. "One of the ways to explore this is to develop hardware that goes in the same direction."

The Stanford project will model the cerebral cortex using a circuit board with 16 chips. Groups of neurons can be set to have different electrical properties, mimicking different types of cells in the cortex

"We want to be able to explore different ideas, different connectivity patterns, different operations in these areas," said Kwabena Boahen, a neuroengineer at Stanford University. "It's not really possible to explore that right now."

If the research yields positive results, it could lead to the development of implants that can treat disorders of the brain. "The real-time aspect of this technology allows us in principle to interface the silicon cortex with the real cortex or brain," says Gert Cauwenberghs, a neuroengineer at the University of California in San Diego.

"There is the promise, at least in the future, to build a prosthesis to replace some lost motor function or sensory function."