Neuromorphic Controller

Overview

The NT Adaptive PCIe is a fully parallel silicon neural network – it is a chain of identical elements (neurons) addressed in parallel and which have their own “genetic” material to learn and recall patterns without running a single line of code and without reporting to any supervising unit. In addition, the neurons fully collaborate with each other through a bi-directional and parallel neuron bus which is the key to accuracy, adaptivity and speed performance. Indeed, each neuron incorporates information from all the other neurons into its own learning logic and into its response logic.
Access to the network is through the PCIe interface.

Controller description

Neural network key features

• Group of 2304 neurons (up to 256 components) identical neurons recognizing the same input pattern in parallel;
• The size of components – 8 bit;
• All neurons have the same behavior and execute the instructions in parallel independent from the cluster or even chip they belong to;
• High-speed learning and recognition for one neuron(<80 μsec);
• The neurons can be associated to different contexts (up to 128) and their use can be enabled or disabled by selecting a context value;
• No controller or supervisor;
• Selection of one out of two classifiers: K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) or Radial Basis Function (RBF);
• Selection of one out of two metrics: L1(Manhattan distance) or Lsup(Chebyshev distance);
• Recognition time is independent of the number of neurons in use;
• Automatic model generator built into the neurons

Operations

• The interface to neural network comes down to 4 main operations:
• Learn a vector;
• Recognize a vector;
• Save the knowledge built by the neurons;
• Load a knowledge into the neurons.

These operations are executed through API functions.

Data structure

The content of each neuron is saved in 263 bytes as follows:

• 256 bytes of vector;
• 1 byte of context;
• 2 bytes of minimum influence field;
• 2 bytes of active influence field;
• 2 bytes of category.

Electrical specifications

Vcc power supply 12 VDC
Total power up to 4 W

Interface specification

PCI Express X1 2.5 GT/s (PCI Express Base Specification, rev.2.1)

Mechanical specification

For installation in a 2U enclosure.
Dimension 120×68 mm.

Climatic specification

Operating Temperature -40…+60 ℃
Storage Temperature -50… +80 ℃