The goal of the GDR BIOCOMP is to facilitate interdisciplinary exchanges in France around a common goal: the realization of bio-inspired hardware systems.
We seek to understand the mechanisms at work in biological systems in order to create chips based on natural computation, in particular neuromorphic, but also vice versa, to build architectures hybridizing wetware and hardware as test systems to better understand biology. In France there is a wealth of expertise in all disciplines concerned with hardware implementations of natural computation: biology, cognitive psychology, computational neuroscience, mathematics, computer architecture and data processing systems, microelectronics, nanotechnology and physics. Realizing bio-inspired chips is complex and requires advanced skills in all these disciplines. By organizing interdisciplinary meetings and conferences, our goal is to bring together different communities so that they can understand each other and work together. In addition to interdisciplinarity, one of the biggest challenges that the researcher wishing to participate in the design and implementation of a bio-inspired system has to face is the proliferation of this emerging field. At every link in the chain choices must be made among the many possibilities: what model to choose or invent, what system to build, what materials to use for this purpose? Our objective is to explore the most promising approaches for efficient hardware implementation of natural computing and to realize these bio-inspired systems with different technological substrates.