VLSI neural systems and circuits

ULSI technology can potentially fabricate 10⁹ devices on a single die. Numerous applications in the areas of vision, speech, sensor processing, nonlinear control, and learning exist for such integrated circuits, but first new fault-tolerant architectures need to be developed. One approach is to design systems that are inspired by the human brain. These architectures operate in a highly parallel fashion to solve extremely complex problems with a high degree of fault tolerance. A description is given of the pulsed neural cell, which is a compact analog neural circuit. The pulsed neural cell performs four-quadrant multiplication, refreshes the stored analog voltages, and allows linear and nonlinear outputs. This cell allows the building of massive and highly complex neural implementations