[PDF] A Neurocomputer Board Based on the ANNA Neural Network Chip

A board is described that contains the ANNA neural-network chip, and a DSP32C digital signal processor. The ANNA (Analog Neural Network Arithmetic unit) chip performs mixed analog/digital processing. The combination of ANNA with the DSP allows high-speed, end-to-end execution of numerous signal-processing applications, including the preprocessing, the neural-net calculations, and the postprocessing steps. The ANNA board evaluates neural networks 10 to 100 times faster than the DSP alone. The board is suitable for implementing large (million connections) networks with sparse weight matrices. Three applications have been implemented on the board: a convolver network for slant detection of text blocks, a handwritten digit recognizer, and a neural network for recognition-based segmentation.