GANGLION—A Fast Field-Programmable Gate Array Implementation of a Connectionist Classifier

Abstract

This paper describes the architecture, implementation, and application of GANGLION, a totally digital connectionist classifier. This fully interconnected feedforward net with one hidden layer is capable of generating 4.48 billion interconnections per second. The architecture is realized on a single 9U VME card and is built entirely from off-the-shelf components. The very high throughput of 20 million decisions per second is achieved by making efficient use of field-programmable gate arrays. Specifically, we take advantage of the reprogrammability of the devices to automatically generate new custom hardware for each application of the classifier. © 1992 IEEE