A digital hardware pulse-mode neuron with plecewise linear activation function

This paper proposes a new type of digital pulse-mode neuron that employs piecewise-linear function as its activation function. The neuron is implemented on field programmable gate array (FPGA) and tested be experiments. As well as theoretical analysis, the experimental results show that tire piecewise-linear function of the proposed neuron is programmable and robust against the change in the number of input signals. To demonstrate the effect of piecewise-linear activation function, pulse-mode multilayer neural network with on-chip learning is implemented on PPGA with the proposed neuron, and its learning performance is verified by experiments. By approximating tire sigmoid function by the piecewise-linear function, tire convergence rate of the learning and generalization capability are improved.