Low-Resource Bluespec Design of a Modular Acquisition and Stimulation System for Neuroscience (Abstract Only)

Abstract

We have compared two different resource arbitration architectures in our developed data acquisition and stimuli generator system for neuroscience research, entirely specified in a high-level Hardware Description Language (HDL). One of them was designed with a decoupled and latency insensitive modular approach, allowing for easier code reuse, while the other adopted a centralized scheme, constructed specifically for our application. The usage of a high-level HDL allowed straightforward and stepwise code modifications to transform one architecture into the other. Despite the logic complexity penalty of synthesizing our hardware from a highly abstract language, both architectures were implemented in a very small programmable logic device without even consuming all the hardware resources. While the decoupled design has shown more resilience to input activity bursts, the centralized one gave an economy of about 10-15% in the device logic element usage. This system is not only useful for neuroscience protocols that require timing determinism and synchronous stimuli generation, but has also demonstrated that high-level languages can be effectively used for synthesizing hardware in small programmable devices.