Emulating human brain - with analogous NN chips Considering the answers of this question, emulating a human brain with the current computing capacity is currently impossible, but we aren't very far from it.

Note, 1 or 2 decades ago, similar calculations had similar results.

The clock frequency of the modern CPUs seem to be stopped, currently the miniaturization (-> mobile use), the RAM/cache improvement and the multi-core paralellization are the main lines of the development.

Ok, but what is the case with the analogous chips? In case of a NN, it is not a very big problem, if it is not very accurate, the NN would adapt to the minor manufacturing differences in its learning phase. And a single analogous wire can substitute a complex integer multiplication-division unit, while the whole surface of the analogous printed circuit could work parallel.

According to this post, "software rewirable" analogous circuits, essentially "analogous FPGAs" already exist. Although the capacity of the FPGAs is highly below the capacity of the ASICs with the same size, maybe analogous chips for neural networks could also exist.

I suspect, if it is correct, maybe even the real human brain model wouldn't be too far. It would still require a massively parallel system of costly analogous NN chips, but it seems to me not impossible.

Could this idea work? Maybe there is even active research/development into this direction?
I'm not sure about "emulating the brain" per-se, but in a more general sense there has been some thought given to using analog computing for AI/ML.  It seems clear that analog computers do have certain advantages over digital computers.  For one, they can (depending on the application) be faster, albeit at the cost of some loss of precision.  But that's OK, because I don't think anybody believes the human brain is calculating floating point math using digital computing techniques either.  The human brain appears, at least superficially, to be largely probabilistic and able to tolerate some "slop" numerically.  

The downside to analog computers, as I understand it, is that they're not as flexible... you basically hardwire a circuit to do one specific "thing" and that's really all it can do.  To change the "programming" you have to literally solder in a new component! Or, I suppose, adjust a potentiometer or adjustable capacitor, etc.  Anyway, the point is that digital computers are supremely flexible, which is one big reason they came to dominate the world.  But I can see where there could be room for going analog for discrete functions that make up some or all of an intelligent system.

As for research in the area, you might look into whatever DARPA was / is doing. There was an article in Wired a while back, talking about some DARPA initiatives related to analog computing.