P. Lee et al., ADVANCES IN THE DESIGN OF THE TOTEM NEUROCHIP, Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment, 389(1-2), 1997, pp. 134-137
The TOTEM neurochip has proved its viability as a system for real-time
computation in HEP and space applications requiring high performance
for event classification, data mining, and signal processing. ISA and
VME boards integrating the TOTEM chip as a coprocessor have been made
available to selected experimental groups which reported satisfactory
results. This paper presents a new architectural solution yielding hig
her performance and reduced silicon area, The on-chip computational st
ructures have been entirely redesigned to take advantage of a novel ap
proach to number representation that, at the cost of a provably bounde
d approximation, leads to a much-reduced silicon area, lower power dis
sipation, and faster computation. This approach is validated by simula
tion results on experimental data, as presented in the paper.