INTEGRATION OF ARCHITECTURES BASED ON FORMAL NEURAL NETWORKS - A CHALLENGE FOR SUBMICROMETER TECHNOLOGIES

Connexionist architectures, using the formal neuron concept, may exhibit properties reminding of some simple cognitive functions. They may thus lead to new signal processing machines, implementing classification and generalization functionalities, or associative memories, for instance. Integration of these functions in silicon can be beneficial, if it is possible to solve connectivity issues and synaptic coefficients realisation, whether using analog or digital technologies. With coming submicrometer technologies, it will be possible to make progress towards networks more important than those which are integrated nowadays, but it is probably only through association of independent networks, cooperating within hierarchized architectures, that it will be possible to implement higher level functions, having a strong parallelism.