A Novel Associative Memory Implemented Using Collective Computation

A radically new type of associative memory, the ASSOCMEM, has been implemented in VLSI and tested. Analog circuit techniques are used to construct a network that evolves towards fully restored (digital) fixed-points that are the memories of the system. Association occurs on the whole source word, each bit of which may assume a continuous analog value. The network does not require the distinction of a search key from a data field in either the source or target words. A key may be dynamically defined by differentially weighting any subset of the source word. The key need not be exact; the system will evolve to the closest memory. In the case when the key is the whole input word, the system may be thought of as performing error correction