SPERT: a VLIW/SIMD microprocessor for artificial neural network computations

SPERT (synthetic perceptron testbed) is a fully programmable single chip microprocessor designed for efficient execution of artificial neural network algorithms. The first implementation is in a 1.2 mu m CMOS technology with a 50 MHz clock rate, and a prototype system is being designed to occupy a double SBus slot within a Sun Sparcstation. SPERT sustains over 300*10/sup 6/ connections per second during pattern classification, and around 100*10/sup 6/ connection updates per second while running the popular error backpropagation training algorithm. This represents a speedup of around two orders of magnitude over a Sparcstation-2 for algorithms of interest. An earlier system produced by the group, the Ring Array Processor (RAP), used commercial DSP chips. Compared with a RAP multiprocessor of similar performance, SPERT represents over an order of magnitude reduction in cost for problems where fixed-point arithmetic is satisfactory.