The TrueNorth chip is based on non–von Neumann architecture using contemporary silicon technology.

Scientists have developed a brain inspired computer chip which mimics the neurons inside your brain.

The chip consumes just 70 milliwatts of power and can perform 46 billion synaptic operations per second.

Since 2008, scientists from IBM have been working with DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) programme.

They have developed the chip, or processor called TrueNorth, which is claimed to be efficient, scalable, and flexible non-von Neumann architecture using contemporary silicon technology.

TrueNorth has 5.4-billion-transistors with 4096 neurosynaptic cores interconnected via an intrachip network that integrates 1 million programmable spiking neurons and 256 million configurable synapses.

It can be tiled in two dimensions through an interchip communication interface and can be scaled up to a cortexlike sheet of arbitrary size.

The chip has been fabricated on Samsung’s 28nm process and claimed to be IBM’s largest chip in terms of transistor count.

During the simulation of complex recurrent neural networks, the chip consumes less than 100mW of power and has a power density of 20mW / cm2.

IBM fellow Dharmendra Modha said: "Unlike the prevailing von Neumann architecture — but like the brain — TrueNorth has a parallel, distributed, modular, scalable, fault-tolerant, flexible architecture that integrates computation, communication, and memory and has no clock.

"It is fair to say that TrueNorth completely redefines what is now possible in the field of brain-inspired computers, in terms of size, architecture, efficiency, scalability, and chip design techniques."

The chip can be used in many applications that use complex neural networks in real time including multi-object detection and classification.