GANGLION-a fast field-programmable gate array implementation of a connectionist classifier

71 The architecture, implementation, and application of GANGLION, a totally digital connectionist classifier, are described. This fully interconnected feedforward net with one hidden layer is capable of generating 4.48 billion interconnection/s. The architecture is realized on a single 9U VME card and is built entirely from off-the-shelf components. The very high throughput of 20 million decision/s is achieved by making efficient use of field-programmable gate arrays. Specifically, the authors take advantage of the reprogrammability of the devices to automatically generate new custom hardware for each application of the classifier