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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Comput. Neurosci.
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fncom.2025.1559936
Engineered biological neuronal networks as basic logic operators
Provisionally accepted
Joël Küchler 
Katarina Vulic 
Haotian Yao Christian Valmaggia Stephan J. Ihle Sean Weaver 
Janos Vörös *- ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland
We present an in vitro neuronal network with controlled topology capable of performing basic Boolean computations, such as NAND and OR. Neurons cultured within polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microstructures on high-density microelectrode arrays (HD-MEAs) enable precise interaction through extracellular voltage stimulation and spiking activity recording. The architecture of our system allows for creating non-linear functions with two inputs and one output. Additionally, we analyze various encoding schemes, comparing the limitations of rate coding with the potential advantages of spike-timing-based coding strategies. This work contributes to the advancement of hybrid intelligence and biocomputing by offering insights into neural information encoding and decoding with the potential to create fully biological computational systems.
Keywords: neuron-on-a-chip, biocomputation, neural networks, neural circuit, Boolean, Microelectrode Array (MEA), encoding, Hybrid intelligence
Received: 13 Jan 2025; Accepted: 31 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Küchler, Vulic, Yao, Valmaggia, Ihle, Weaver and Vörös. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Janos Vörös, ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland
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