Customer Reviews:
 make silicon eyes and ears March 7, 2007
The book describes an interesting niche in VLSI design. Most VLSI chips implement digital logic. But Mead took a different tack, emphasising the analog mode of operation of the transistors. In most digital electronics texts, this regime of current-voltage performance is mostly cursorily dealt with.
What Mead did was use this often where the current through the source and drain was some exponential function of the voltage at the transistor gate. An oversimplification, perhaps, but it captures the essence of the book. By tying together transistors, Mead was able to build circuits that emulated the performance of the eye and ear. The text then uses these to make silicon chips that might mimic the biological sensors.
The book also embodies Mead's approach to understanding the brain and its neural networks. He claims that the problem is very hard. And that we can usefully make progress by looking at the brain's input sensors. As these are much simpler to understand and implement.
Mead carried the ideas here into Synaptics. A Silicon Valley startup that he co-founded.
Sadly, the book is out of print. (Why??) The prices of $129 and higher by third party sellers are way excessive.
the best book about biologically inspired models August 15, 2002
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is definitely a must-read book for researchers and students in the field of neuromorphic engineering such that they could learn how to engineer the biological systems...
 The classic text for this kind of circuitry. June 7, 1997
Assuming you know something about CMOS and VLSIdesign, this is the classic text to cover thebroad base to get started in understanding how one goes about designing actual hardware for various neural network architectures. Both analog and digital approaches are discussed, and the circuits are clearly explained with lots of schematics and plenty of derivative mathematics that show why a particular approach has utility for a given problem. There are a lot of new books (Mead has a new one out) but they owe a large debt to this book.
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