PARALLEL FUZZY INFORMATION-PROCESSING SYSTEM

During the past decade, several specific hardwares for the fast fuzzy inference have been developed. However, most of them are dedicated to a specific inference method and thus cannot support fuzzy set operations. In this paper, we present a hardware architecture called KAFA (KAIST fuzzy accelerator) which provides various fuzzy inference methods and fuzzy set operations. The architecture has SIMD structure, which consists of two parts: a system control unit (MC: main controller) and an arithmetic unit (FPE: fuzzy processing element). The prototype of the proposed architecture was developed by using FPGA chips. Each FPE has a maximum speed of 5M FLOPS (fuzzy logic operations per second). As the KAFA contains 128 FPEs, we achieve a peak performance of 640M FLOPS. The speed of the KAFA holds promise for the development of new fuzzy application systems.