ABSTRACT
This paper presents a pulse-coded winner-take-all (PWTA) network which employs a unique combination of presynaptic and lateral inhibition that can be efficiently implemented in VLSI. The manner in which the network not only selects the winner but also indicates the weight of the decision made is unique among established winner-take-all networks. A combination of all-or-nothing and graded responses is encoded as a variable rate pulse train appearing only at the output of the winning unit. The mechanism used is closely related to the presynaptic inhibition approach introduced in [Yuille 88] with the exception that it is self-resetting and has properties which make it well suited for electronic realizations using asynchronous pulse-coded circuitry.
