Paper from Nicolas Oros BrainChip Scientist, page-6

But in all serious myASX, check this out:

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Andrew Cassidy and Rodrigo Alvarez-Icaza of IBM for their support. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Award number 1302125 and Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems. We also would like to thank the Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop, The Institute of Neuromorphic Engineering, and their National Science Foundation, DoD and Industrial Sponsors.


So the question is, why would Brainchip allow their employees to work on IBM's tech unless their wasn't something in it for them? Unless this project was started before the author was employed by Brainchip and was allowed to continue working on it while at BRN? This also proves that SNAP is lightyears ahead.

It mentions the NSF award:

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1302125&HistoricalAwards=false

	Column 1	Column 2
0	Initial Amendment Date:	September 10, 2013
1
2	Latest Amendment Date:	May 6, 2015
3
4	Award Number:	1302125
5
6	Award Instrument:	Standard Grant
7
8	Program Manager:	Kenneth C. WhangIIS Div Of Information & Intelligent SystemsCSE Direct For Computer & Info Scie & Enginr
9
10	Start Date:	September 15, 2013
11
12	End Date:	August 31, 2017 (Estimated)
13
14	Awarded Amount to Date:	$513,698.00
15
16	Investigator(s):	Jeffrey Krichmar [email protected] (Principal Investigator)Nikil Dutt (Co-Principal Investigator)
17
18	Sponsor:	University of California-Irvine141 Innovation Drive, Ste 250Irvine, CA 92617-3213 (949)824-7295
19
20	NSF Program(s):	INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY RESEARC,CROSS-EF ACTIVITIES,CRCNS,ROBUST INTELLIGENCE,ACTIVATION
21
22	Program Reference Code(s):	7495, 7924, 8750, 9251, 7327
23
24	Program Element Code(s):	1640, 7275, 7327, 7495, 7713

ABSTRACT

A framework will be developed to help scientists and engineers create brain-inspired, brain-sized networks that can carry out practical applications. Large-scale spiking neural networks, which follow the brain's architecture and activity, have been used to successfully model phenomena such as learning and memory, vision, auditory processing, neural oscillations, and many other important aspects of neural function. Additionally, spiking neural networks are particularly well suited to run on neuromorphic hardware, state of the art computers that emulate the brain?s structure and dynamics. These neuromorphic systems depend on the binary nature of spikes to lower communication bandwidth and energy consumption. Although significant progress has been made towards the specification and simulation of large-scale spiking neural networks on a variety of hardware platforms, many challenges remain before these neurobiologically inspired algorithms can be used in practical applications. While biology does provide increasingly abundant empirical data that can constrain these systems, many parameter values must be chosen manually by the designer to achieve appropriate neuronal dynamics, a task that is extremely tedious and often error-prone. To meet this challenge, an automated parametertuning framework will be developed that is capable of quickly and efficiently tuning large-scale spiking neural networks. The framework will leverage recent progress in evolutionary algorithms and optimization techniques for off-the-shelf graphics processing units (GPUs). The parameter search will be guided by the idea in neuroscience that biological networks adapt their responses to increase the amount of transmitted information, reduce redundancies, and span the stimulus space. This notion of efficient coding will guide the tuning process of the artificial spiking neural networks. Computer scientists and engineers will be able to use the resulting automated parameter-tuning framework to create brain inspired applications, such as vision and memory systems, on neuromorphic hardware. Moreover, the resulting framework will allow neuroscientists to more readily create models that better describe their empirical data and generate new quantitative hypotheses that can be tested in the laboratory.