ACE: a digital floating point CNN emulator engine

The architecture of ACE, a multiprocessor analogic cellular neural network (CNN) emulator engine consisting of 2 to 16 TMS320C40 floating point DSPs is introduced. The engine containing up to 512 Mbyte RAM (enough to store a 512/spl times/512/spl times/512 sized CNN cube) which can be controlled through its SCSI port. It can either accelerate the multilayer CNN simulator CNNM or be accessed directly from the high level, C-based analogic CNN language ACL to achieve the simulation speed of /spl sim/2.8 /spl mu/sec/cell/iteration/DSP for 3/spl times/3 linear templates.