Design and Implementation of a Fast General Purpose Fuzzy Processor

1. Introduction

Fuzzy inference is becoming an attractive approach to solve control and decision-making problems. This is mainly attributed to its inherent ability to manage the intuitive and ambiguous behavioral rules given by a human operator to describe a complex system. The application of fuzzy technologies to real-time control problems implies that hardware realizations can be adapted to the fuzzy paradigm (Azar, 2010). Many microelectronics implementations of fuzzy controllers have been proposed, recently. However, if fuzzy controllers are to be massively adopted in consumer products, they must fulfill some additional characteristics. First, they must be flexible, that is, suitable for adapting their functionality to different applications. This implies the capability to program the knowledge base and select different inference mechanisms. On the other hand, considering fuzzy controllers as integrated circuits, they must be efficient in terms of silicon area and operational speed (Jimenez et al., 1998).

In this paper, one of the architectures of the general-purpose fuzzy processors is designed with high speed and degree of the parallelism and programmed by VHDL code and implemented on Spartan 3E starter kit. The characteristics of the proposed fuzzy processor are shown in Table 1. It has up to 4 inputs and one output with 8-bit width for each and a number of rules depending on the memory size. The parameters of the fuzzy processor such as the number of inputs, the number of rules, and the membership values for each input, are specified by a PC GUI, which is designed for simulating the fuzzy controller depending on the application and downloading the parameters to the fuzzy processor via the PC serial port communications.