Sigmoid function approximation for ANN implementation in FPGA devices

Abstract

The objective of this work is the implementation of Artificial Neural Network on a FPGA board. This implementation aim is to contribute in the hardware integration solutions in the areas such as monitoring, diagnosis, maintenance and control of power system as well as industrial processes. Since the Simulink library provided by Xilinx, has all the blocks that are necessary for the design of Artificial Neural Networks except a few functions such as sigmoid function. In this work, an approximation of the sigmoid function in polynomial form has been proposed. Then, the sigmoid function approximation has been implemented on FPGA using the Xilinx library. Tests results are satisfactory