Information Transfer in Neuronal Circuits: From Biological Neurons to Neuromorphic Electronics

The advent of neuromorphic electronics is increasingly revolutionizing the concept of computation. In the last decade, several studies have shown how materials, architectures, and neuromorphic devices can be leveraged to achieve brain-like computation with limited power consumption and high energy efficiency. Neuromorphic systems have been mainly conceived to support spiking neural networks that embed bioinspired plasticity rules such as spike time-dependent plasticity to potentially support both unsupervised and supervised learning. Despite substantial progress in the field, the information transfer capabilities of biological circuits have not yet been achieved. More importantly, demonstrations of the actual performance of neuromorphic systems in this context have never been presented. In this paper, we report similarities between biological, simulated, and artificially reconstructed microcircuits in terms of information transfer from a computational perspective. Specifically, we extensively analyzed the mutual information transfer at the synapse between mossy fibers and granule cells by measuring the relationship between pre- and post-synaptic variability. We extended this analysis to memristor synapses that embed rate-based learning rules, thus providing quantitative validation for neuromorphic hardware and demonstrating the reliability of brain-inspired applications.