Parallel Hardware for Artificial Neural Networks Using Fixed Floating Point Representation

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) is a well known bio-inspired model that simulates human brain capabilities such as learning and generalization. ANNs consist of a number of interconnected processing units, wherein each unit performs a weighted sum followed by the evaluation of a given activation function. The involved computation has a tremendous impact on the implementation efficiency. Existing hardware implementations of ANNs attempt to speed up the computational process. However, these implementations require a huge silicon area that makes it almost impossible to fit within the resources available on a state-of-the-art FPGAs. In this chapter, a hardware architecture for ANNs that takes advantage of the dedicated adder blocks, commonly called MACs, to compute both the weighted sum and the activation function is devised. The proposed architecture requires a reduced silicon area considering the fact that the MACs come for free as these are FPGA’s built-in cores. Our system uses integer (fixed point) mathematics and operates with fractions to represent real numbers. Hence, floating point representation is not employed and any mathematical computation of the ANN hardware is based on combinational circuitry (performing only sums and multiplications). The hardware is fast because it is massively parallel. Besides, the proposed architecture can adjust itself on-the-fly to the user-defined configuration of the neural network, i.e., the number of layers and neurons per layer of the ANN can be settled with no extra hardware changes. This is a very nice characteristic in robot-like systems considering the possibility of the same hardware may be exploited in different tasks. The hardware also requires another system (a software) that controls the sequence of the hardware computation and provides inputs, weights and biases for the ANN in hardware. Thus, a co-design environment is necessary.