Artificial Intelligence/FPGA

Hi John,

If you are referring to FPGA synthesis, you need to check which software is offered by the FPGA manufacturer of your choice. Mostly they offer free software for the smaller devices.

I have none, and I doubt that there are any software tools available specifically for this purpose. You would need to describe your neurons/neural network in VHDL or so. Perhaps it's a good idea to google for vhdl neuron or something like that. Maybe someone already created some kind of framework that generates you synthesizable code from a more abstract specification.

I remember that Siemens developed a neuro computer around 10 years before (called Synapse 1). That one basically consisted out of tons of Lattice CPLDs.

If you refer to adders, yes, logic blocks of most FPGA series can be configured as adder/subtractor/counter/...

I don't know exactly what is "gaussian or Cauchy noise", but you can generate noise easily with shift registers with XOR-feedback. Perhaps this is what you need. Just stress google to find out more about that.

I hope this gave you some starting points.

Regards, Mario

You can do the whole design flow for Fpgas under Windows (mostly NT). Normaly you get the tools from the Fpga vendor.

Don't know any tools, but there are different people doing AI on VLSI. Feed google with Linear-Integrate-and-Fire for a start in the topic.

You can build an ADC using digital logic an an external RC cirquit. The result is ok for 3-5 bits resolution. The more bits, the more effort you will have to do in the external cirquit (e.g doing an active lowpass with higher order instead of an passive).

bye Thomas

If you can, use Synplify for synthesis. Get the HDL Analist option.

Otherwise, just use the bundles that come from the manufacturer.

Thank you all for the information. I will look into it immediately. If you have anything else to say, I will be surely monitoring this thread.

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Atmel and Xilinx have packages that are free and at cost for developing VHDL and other languages on their FPGA's. I use the Xilinx software for development in Windows XP and 2000.

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I have seen Neural net applications and chaos generators developed on FPGA's for AI applications. Do a search on Google for papers that describe the NN and chaos applications. They also have VHDL source code available.

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Never seen a built-in ADC inside an FPGA but interacting is easy, especially for serial ADC's. I have connected 8 12-bit serial ADC's at one time. VHDL coding is easiest for serial ADC's.

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Yeah, the chaos application mentioned above uses "tricks" to geenrate the chaos "noise". Also, using spread-spectrum codes using a VHDL based LFSR can generate a noise when low-pass filtered on an output pin.