Design of expandable fuzzy inference processor

Fuzzy logic controllers (FLCs) are widely used for applications ranging from industrial automation systems to consumer electronics products. In order to implement the FLC in a straightforward manner, dedicated hardware processors can be used for fast processing. However, the hardware processor is often inflexible to expansion. In the paper a novel architecture of a fuzzy inference processor consisting of IF modules and THEN modules is presented. Using the architecture, one can expand the capacity of an FLC by simply adding another modules. Furthermore, pipelined parallelism is exploited in the architecture. The architecture is implemented and tested as a standard VME board type with discrete components in order to justify the operation