A floating-gate vector-quantizer

We present a floating-gate based system for computing vector quantization (VQ), which is typically used for data compression and classification of signals to symbols. We present an architecture and resulting circuits which will enable direct programming/storage of weight vectors, as well as methods for adaptive VQ. We use an analog bump circuit to perform a continuous distance computation along a particular input coordinate. Unlike a traditional bump circuit, we use differential floating-gate inputs to provide the ability to store the learned value. The current outputs of each bump circuit are summed along a single wire, where the largest result(s) are selected using a winner-take-all circuit. We present experimental results measured from ICs fabricated on a 0.5 μm CMOS process available through MOSIS.