Fan* (Quad-Processor CMOS Chip)  Project Overview

Quad-Processor Integrated Circuit

• Bill led his Motorola team’s creation of a full custom, 100% digital,    CMOS integrated circuit. • 500 of these chips were designed, fabricated, tested and applied in the Cyclone System. • The massively parallel array of neuron-like processors executed    fast self-organizing maps, using an efficiently pipelined “ring” architecture. • Keywords: Hardware, CMOS, Massively Parallel, Pipelined, Self-Organizing Maps, Formal Neurons.          * FAN is a contraction of “Four Artificial Neurons”.

Significance of this Accomplishment

• Cyclone (using FANs) was used to accelerate Motorola R&D such as the team’s highly successful CorDex product. • Cyclonne allowed us to tackle large databases (e.g. stock market). • Cyclonne demonstrated that the “computationally intensive element” (Self-Organizing Maps     a.k.a.SOMs) of our neuroscience-inspired architectures could be made extremely fast,    and power-efficient.

Skills Transferable to Your Projects:

Leadership / Management • Bill led the entire FAN project.    (Mike Gardner, a member of Bill’s team, was an outstanding contributor, too). Theory / R&D • Bill focused his team on SOMs, despite industry-wide pressures to focus on Backpropagation. • This includes Bill’s numerous insights in machine learning, neuroscience,    computer science, cognitive science and hardware design (CMOS design, pipelining,    memory architectures, ALUs and microcode.  Software • Bill led the team’s system/application integration of Cyclone into UNIX-based VME platform.     (Jack Bieker,  a member of Bill’s team, contributed significantly to this task). • All Cyclonne applications employed significant software. Hardware • First silicon was successful.  Bill’s effective design reviews helped accomplish this.   Bill’s experience in logic, memory, microcoded ALUs, and silicon design kept the design on track.

Patents

Patent   (5, 216, 751) Issued   (6 - 1 -1993) Current Owner: Motorola, Inc. Licensing availability: (Please contact Motorola). Contact Info: motorolaventures@motorola.com

Future Opportunities

By pushing beyond the current state-of-the-art, there are these opportunities: • The human brain (neocortex) contains many hundreds of self-organized maps    and there are numerous valuable humans skills that still defy computer implementation. • We can learn from nature’s brilliance, or we can ignore it.    Advanced SOM-like hardware learns from it.  • Today, Intel and AMD multiprocessors beginning  to sell in volume.  Yet, software that    efficiently uses them is lacking.  Cyclonne-like systems have obvious parallelism that    can very efficiently use multiprocessors to execute valuable human-like applications.

Links to related material

• Patent 5216751