UNIVERSAL CNN CELLS

A cellular neural/nonlinear network (CNN) [Chua, 1998] is a biologically inspired system where computation emerges from a collection of simple nonlinear locally coupled cells. This paper reviews our recent research results beginning from the standard uncoupled CNN cell which can realize only linearly separable local Boolean functions, to a generalized universal CNN cell capable of realizing arbitrary Boolean functions. The key element in this evolutionary process is the replacement of the linear discriminant (offset) function w(σ)=σ in the "standard" CNN cell in [Chua, 1998] by a piecewise-linear function defined in terms of only absolute value functions. As in the case of the standard CNN cells, the excitation σ evaluates the correlation between a given input vector u formed by the outputs of the neighboring cells, and a template vector b, which is interpreted in this paper as an orientation vector. Using the theory of canonical piecewise-linear functions [Chua & Kang, 1977], the discriminant function [Formula: see text] is found to guarantee universality and its parameters can be easily determined. In this case, the number of additional parameters and absolute value functions m is bounded by m<2 n -1, where n is the number of all inputs (n=9 for a 3×3 template). An even more compact representation where m<n-1 is also presented which is based on a special form of a piecewise-linear function; namely, a multi-nested discriminant: w (σ) =s (z m +| z m -1 +⋯ | z 1 +| z 0 +σ |||). Using this formula, the "benchmark" Parity function with an arbitrary number of inputs n is found to have an analytical solution with a complexity of only m =O ( log 2 (n)).