SOM Hardware-Accelerator

Many applications of Selforganizin g Feature Maps (SOMs) need a high performance hardware system in order to be efficient. Because of the regular and modular structure of SOMs , a hardware realization is obvious. Based on the idea of a massively parallel system, several chips have been designed, manufactured and tested by the authors. In this paper a high performance system with the latest NBISOM_25 chips is presented. The NBISOM_25 integrated circuit contains 25 processing elements in a 5 by 5 array. Due to the scalability of the chips a VME-bus board was built with 16 ICs on it. The controller for the VME-bus and the SOM hardware are realized using FPGAs. The system runs SOM applications with up to 400 elements in parallel mode (20 by 20 map). Each weight vector can have up to 64 weights of 8 bit accuracy. The maximum performance of the board-system is 4.1 GCPS (recall) and 2.4 GCUPS (learning).