A general-purpose signal processor architecture for neurocomputing and preprocessing applications

A general-purpose Neural Signal Processor MA16 is presented the architecure of which is guided by an analysis of today's neural algorithms. The MA16 executes the elementary algorithmic strings which are compute-bound and shared by all neural nets; operations which are not time consuming are let to hardware off-the-shelf. Digital design is chosen because of flexibility and computation accuracy. The throughput is 800 million connections per second at a clock frequency of 50 MHz (1 connection = 16 bit). This performance is valid for arbitrary networks provided they consist of more than 16 neurons each comprising more than 16 synapses. Depending on the needs of the application under consideration a linear or 2-dimensional array of VLSI chips can be constructed in order to provide sufficient processing power and weight memory.     

SLAN-4?A Software Specification and Design Language

SLAN-4 (``Software Language-4') was developed to meet the need for a formal tool for specifying and designing large software systems. It provides language constructs for algebraic and axiomatic specifications and also pseudocode constructs for the design step. A major design goal was to ease subsequent refinements of a (given) specification. The design can start with a very informal specification, which can be implemented later using lower level concepts. This paper gives an overview of the SLAN-4 syntax and semantics. It concentrates on the most important aspects of: ? abstract data types, ? algebraic specification of abstract data types, and ? axiomatic specification of modules. Because the pseudocode part of SLAN-4 consists mainly of control structures similar to those in modern high-level programming languages, this element of the language is not separately described. The paper includes an example of how to use SLAN-4, and also the experiences gained in using the language to formally specify a real-world software product of about 18 000 lines of code written in an IBM internal high-level language.