A Device For Generating Binary Sequences For Stochastic Computing

A novel technique for the generation of high speed stochastic bit streams in which the `1' density is proportional to a given value. Bit streams of this type are particularly useful in bit serial stochastic computing systems, such as digital stochastic neural networks. The proposed circuitry is highly suitable for VLSI fabrication. INTRODUCTION The use of stochastic bit streams allows a dramatic simplification of the circuitry required to implement many devices [1], since the multiplication of two values may be performed by computing the bit-wise conjunction of two corresponding streams. The highly pipelined digital design described in this paper was developed for use with high speed digital stochastic neural networks, as described in [2, 3, 4]. The proposed stochastic bit stream generator is highly pipelined and thus potentially extremely fast. The individual pipeline stages, known as modulators are simple, and the number used defines the overall resolution of the generated bit strea..