High speed flexible fuzzy hardware for fuzzy information processing

In this paper, we present a system called KAFA (Kaist Fuzzy Accelerator) which provides various fuzzy inference methods and fuzzy set operations. The basic idea of this study is to develop a more general purpose hardware system. The architecture has SIMD structure, which consists of two parts; a system control unit (main controller), and an arithmetic unit (fuzzy processing element (FPE)). Microinstruction codes are defined and any fuzzy operation can be programmed by using these microinstructions. Each FPE has the maximum speed of 10 M FLOPS. As the KAFA contains 128 FPE's, if a fuzzy set consists of 128 elements, we achieve the peak performance of 10 M FSOPS (fuzzy set operation per second) under 10 MHz clock frequency. This system also includes the parallel algorithms for defuzzification on the SIMD mode architecture using KAFA network. The prototype of the proposed architecture was developed with the FPGA chips. The speed of the KAFA holds promise for the development of the new fuzzy application system such as automatic control, fuzzy expert systems, real time systems and fuzzy databases.