The chips could help manage water supplies through real-time data analysis and pattern recognition, Modha said. Computers could generate tsunami warnings through a network of sensors monitoring temperature, pressure, wave height and ocean tide. The chips' cognitive features could help grocers identify bad produce and give smartphones features to better interact with the environment.

IBM and its research partners have already generated some results from the project, such as walking through a maze, playing a game of Pong, or recognizing patterns in data. The researchers are gunning for better results that include image recognition in videos.

IBM has made two prototype chips using the 45-nanometer manufacturing process. Based on traditional circuitry, the chips are organized in a way to recreate the phenomena between spiking neurons and synapses in brains with the help of integrated memory, computation and communication features. The chips use the same basic elements of transistors in microprocessors today, but are wired differently, Modha said.

The company has built individual "digital neurons" in the chips as low-power processing units, and synapses to establish connections between neurons. The neurons and synapses are organized in cross-bar arrays and are supported by a communications infrastructure for neurons to exchange data in real time. The neurons remember recent activities, while the synapses remember the neurons they are associated with.

The chips contain 256 "digital neurons" running at slow speeds of 10MHz that are constantly blasting information to each other. One core contains 262,144 programmable synapses, while the other core contains 65,536 "learning" synapses. Like in the brain, the synapse establishes connections between digital neurons, and the more often a signal is sent to a synapse, the stronger the synapse gets.