There are several indications that brain is organized not on a basis of individual unreliable neurons, but on a micro-circuital scale providing Lego blocks employed to create complex architectures. At such an intermediate scale, the firing activity in the microcircuits is governed by collective effects emerging by the background noise soliciting spontaneous firing, the degree of mutual connections between the neurons, and the topology of the connections. We compare spontaneous firing activity of small populations of neurons adhering to an engineered scaffold with simulations of biologically plausible CMOS artificial neuron populations whose spontaneous activity is ignited by tailored background noise. We provide a full set of flexible and low-power consuming silicon blocks including neurons, excitatory and inhibitory synapses, and both white and pink noise generators for spontaneous firing activation. We achieve a comparable degree of correlation of the firing activity of the biological neurons by controlling the kind and the number of connection among the silicon neurons. The correlation between groups of neurons, organized as a ring of four distinct populations connected by the equivalent of interneurons, is triggered more effectively by adding multiple synapses to the connections than increasing the number of independent point-to-point connections. The comparison between the biological and the artificial systems suggests that a considerable number of synapses is active also in biological populations adhering to engineered scaffolds.
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