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LEARNINGALGORITHM
R. Kimball Predey, M.S.
.-P
INTRODUCTION
The m of artificial neural networks holds promise in
solving many problems that traditional digital computers have
had only limited success in solving. ASICs and
neuro"pute.rs are still very expensive. So, most artificial
n d systems exist as computer simulations. These
simulations require a large number of floating point
calculations. This means that the simulations must be m on
fast machines such as "es, workstations or high
performance PC's to produce solutions in a timely manner.
The high performance machines are also expensive. Thus
artificial neural networks are still out of reach for mauy
applications.
At Tennessee Technological University, research is being
conducted on the umstruction of a multilayer perceptron
trained by the backpropagation algorithm @PA) [l]. The
network is an attached processor in a low performance
personal computer. It is being implemeated using Xilinx
field prSpz"ble gate arrays WAS)
on a standard
PC/AT expansion card. The network is compatible with a
reconfigurable system being developed at the university [2].
Due to limitations on the amout of hardware that could
be placed in the FPGAS, the BPAwas adapted to use fixed
point arithmetic. The hardware accelerator designed to
simulate multilayer perceptrons using the backpropagation
training algorithm is called FA"-BACK. FA"-BACK is
a proof-ofconcept research effort in implementing a
neumc0xnpute.r using an FPGA-based reconfigurable system.
Software simulators of the fixed and floating point
SYSTEM DESIGN
BACK'S bardware.
In the calculation of the sigmoidal output and its
derivative, the net input to thenode wasused as an address
into a lookup table, which supplied the nodes's output value.
Fig. 1illustmks this lookup table mechanism. The derivative
of the sigmoidal functionwas calculated with a similar lookup
table.
204+-]
2W7
0'
15
Equation (2) was used to calculate the data for the derivative
lookup table.
r
137
In Equations (1) and (2), the constant scale was 16 and X was
0.7.
RESULTS
138