One of the major obstacles found when trying to construct artefacts derived from principles observed in living beings is the lack of actual dynamic hardware with autonomous capabilities. Even if programmable devices offer the possibility of modifying the functionality implemented in the device, they rely on external hardware and software elements to provide its physical configuration. In this paper we present a new family of electronic devices, called POEtic, whose architecture has been derived from the basic properties that can be extracted from the three major organization principles present in living beings: phylogenesis, ontogenesis and epigenesis. We will demonstrate that the capabilities present in these new programmable devices make them an ideal candidate for the real-time emulation of large-scale biologically inspired spiking neural network models.