Abstract

Introduction This chapter describes a methodology for designing digital VLSI neurochips which emphasizes area, power, and performance estimation to facilitate architectural exploration in the early stages of design. It first discusses some key aspects of mapping neural net algorithms onto VLSI architectures. It then introduces a set of circuit level building blocks commonly used in constructing digital nets. It discusses how to estimate chip area, performance, and power consumption in architectures constructed from these blocks, showing how to include technology scaling rules in the estimation process. It concludes with a detailed discussion of a CMOS implementation of a digital Boltzmann machine. 2 Mapping algorithms to architectures An algorithm is a set of tasks to be applied to data in a specified order to transform inputs and internal state to desired outputs. An architecture is a set of resources and interconnections. Mapping algorithms to architectures

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