Implementation of neural network hardware based on a floating point operation in an FPGA

This paper presents a hardware design and implementation of the radial basis function (RBF) neural network (NN) by the hardware description language. Due to its nonlinear characteristics, it is very difficult to implement for a system with integer-based operation. To develop nonlinear functions such sigmoid functions or exponential functions, floating point operations are required. The exponential function is designed based on the 32bit single-precision floating-point format. In addition, to update weights in the network, the back-propagation algorithm is also implemented in the hardware. Most operations are per-formed in the floating-point based arithmetic unit and accomplished sequentially by the instruction order stored in ROM. The NN is implemented and tested on the Altera FPGA "Cyclone2 EP2C70F672C8" for nonlinear classifications.