A Pulsed Communication/Computation Framework for Analog VLSI Perceptive Systems

This paper presents the principles, the main propertiesand some applications of a pulsed communication system adaptedto the needs of the analog VLSI implementation of perceptivesystems. The system takes advantage of the fact that activitiesin perception tasks are often sparsely distributed over a largenumber of elementary processing units (cells) and facilitatesaccess to the communication channel for the more active cells.The resulting architecture can be advantageously used to setup connections between distant cells on the same chip or point-to-pointconnections between cells on different chips when direct wiringis prohibitive. Cells communicate in an asynchronous fashionwhich conserves the fine time relationships of events. The systemalso lends itself to the simple circuit implementation of typicalbiologically inspired connectivity patterns such as projectionof the activity of one cell on a region (its projective field)of the next neural processing layer, which can be on a differentchip in an actual implementation, as is the case for one of theapplications presented: an oriented-edges enhancement system.