Authors´ Reply2

The idea on the design of cellular associative memories for ordered retrievals had occurred to one of us (Ramamoorthy) around 1970 when he was a consultant to Texas Instruments Incorporated. Subsequently, at his suggestion, the second author (Turner) at the University of Texas, Austin, explored and designed the system. The basic idea was also communicated to Dr. W. Litzler and Mr. Wes Wester of Texas Instruments and the thesis committee of Mr. Turner [4] around the same time. The second author´s thesis [4] which was submitted in August 1972 and is available from the Library of the University of Texas at Austin, contains the basic designs and algorithms [4, pp. 14, 21, 32, 46] described in the paper. In 1975, the third author (Wah) improved and applied all the algorithms for associative searches based on database machine design principle. The current design also focuses on the use of associative memory for multiple response resolution.