Objective : To build a neural network - lets say a trained ANN in a FPGA Available Resources : Xilinx Virtex-II Pro Hi all I have been trying to build a ANN for quite sometime. I need your comments and criticism on the methods i followed and will be following
- I tried to build a single neuron first ( 4 bit input ) , and i used MAC core and LUT for implementing activation function( a managable
1024 values in LUT ) Then i continued with building 8 bit neuron, but got stuck at implementing the LUT ( 2^20 values becoz the output of MAC is 20 bit number )
- Lately I came across Xilinx System Generator - A highlevel modelling tool targetted for DSP application integrated with MATLAB Simulink. Its kind of cool so far, I dont have to worry abt entering 2^20 values into LUT, just initialize ROM with the acitivation functino expression and implementing MAC is with a multipier and adder blocks. In fact i made it to the extend of completing the input layer of ANN with 5 neurons.( keep in mind, its a trained network so i knew the weights )
- hmm, hmm System generator is cool , but I have a more cool device Virtex-II pro with powerpc processor, now i have the choice of implementing few things in hardware and others in software. But not sure how hard it would be integrate components with PPC bus.
- Are there any xilinx cores for a neuron????????!!!
waiting on your comments Thanks Ram