System

Abstract

One of the primary advantages of VLSI design as a modeling medium is that a chip, once fabricated, can be combined with other chips in a larger system with no degradation of performance. The function of the entire system can be tested in a real-time environment. The components described in Chapters 3 and 4 are combined into a system that calculates the stereocorrespondence of simple real images, in one dimension, in real time. The computation is performed by three chips: two transient-detecting retinae and the stereocorrespondence chip. In addition to these three chips, two receiver chips, described in Chapter 3, are included for instrumenting the address-event output of the two silicon retinae, independently of the stereocorrespondence computation. The stereocorrespondence system is shown in Figure 5.1. This stereocorrespondence system is primitive, but it is the first multichip analog neuromorphic system to interact directly with the environment.