Analysis and design of associative memories based on recurrent neural network with discontinuous activation functions

This paper considers a recurrent neural network (RNN) with a special class of discontinuous activation function which is piecewise constants in the state space. One sufficient condition is established to ensure that the novel recurrent neural networks can have (4k−1)ⁿ locally exponential stable equilibrium points. Such RNN is suitable for synthesizing high-capacity associative memories. The design procedure is presented with the method of singular value decomposition. Finally, the validity and performance of the results are illustrated by use of two numerical examples.