An analog astrocyte–neuron interaction circuit for neuromorphic applications

Recent neurophysiologic findings have shown that astrocytes (the most abundant type of glial cells) are active partners in neural information processing and regulate the synaptic transmission dynamically. Motivated by these findings, in the present research, an analog neuromorphic circuit to study neuron---astrocyte signaling is presented. In this analog circuit, the firing dynamics of the neuron is described by Izhikevich neuron circuit and the $$\hbox {Ca}^{2+}$$Ca2+ dynamics of a single astrocyte explained by a functional simplified model introduced by Montaseri et al. Using the proposed neuron---astrocyte circuit, it is demonstrated that the proposed analog astrocyte is able to activate the analog neuron or change the neuron spiking frequency through bidirectional communication. This suggests that analog astrocyte is capable of modulating spike transmission frequency. Moreover, our results suggest that the analog circuit of neuron---astrocyte crosstalk produces diverse neural responses and therefore enhances the information processing capabilities of the neuromorphic circuits. This is suitable for applications in reconfigurable neuromorphic devices which implement biologically brain circuits.