  Real-time coupling of cell cultures to neuromorphic circuits necessitates a
neuromorphic network that replicates biological behaviour both on a per-neuron
and on a population basis, with a network size comparable to the culture. We
present a large neuromorphic system composed of 9 chips, with overall 2880
neurons and 144M conductance-based synapses. As they are realized in a robust
switched-capacitor fashion, individual neurons and synapses can be configured
to replicate with high fidelity a wide range of biologically realistic
behaviour. In contrast to other exploration/heuristics-based approaches, we
employ a theory-guided mesoscopic approach to configure the overall network to
a range of bursting behaviours, thus replicating the statistics of our targeted
in-vitro network. The mesoscopic approach has implications beyond our proposed
biohybrid, as it allows a targeted exploration of the behavioural space, which
is a non-trivial task especially in large, recurrent networks.
