Digital neural emulators using tree accumulation and communication structures

Three digital artificial neural network processors suitable for the emulation of fully interconnected neural networks are proposed. The processors use N² multipliers and an arrangement of tree structures that provide the communication and accumulation function either individually or in a combined manner using communicating adder trees. The performance for the emulation of an N-neuron network for all processors is achieved in 2log₂N+C time units, where C is a constant equal to the multiplication, neuron activation, and internal fixed delays. The feasibility and characteristics of the proposed configurations to emulate single and/or multiple neural networks simultaneously are discussed, and a comparison with recently proposed neurocomputer architectures is reported