A new digital pulse-mode neuron with adjustable activation function

This paper describes a new pulse-mode digital neuron which is based on voting neuron. The signal level of the neuron is represented by frequency of pulse signals. The proposed neuron provides adjustable nonlinear function, which resembles the sigmoid function. The proposed neuron and experimental multilayer neural network (MNN) are implemented on field programmable gate array (FPGA) and various experiments are conducted to test the performance of the proposed system. The experimental results show that the proposed neuron has rigid adjustable nonlinear function.