SCX project - Multi-board systems

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Possible Achitectures

Each SCX-1 board has two Domain Address-Event Bus (DAEB) ports, A and B. Thus it can participate in up to two Address-Event domains. Each domain may connect up to eight SCX boards. Therefore many multi-domain architectures are possible with some or all of the boards involved acting as bridges between domains.

Currently, the DAEBs are 16 bits wide*, but each board has the ability to do 'address-event translation', ie. changing the number used to represent an AE when it bridges the event from one DAEB to its other DAEB. So multi-domain architectures can be extended to include a much larger number of neurons than a 16-bit wide address would otherwise allow, because the DAEB width only determines how many neurons can access a particular local domain address space, rather than the total number of neurons in an entire multi-board system.

<Insert figures showing possible multi-board system architectures>

*64 bit wide domain buses are anticipated by the current hardware, but not used.


Configuring multi-board systems

Configuring multi-board systems is non-trivial as many hardware and software configurable items must be set correctly on each board for correct inter-operation with other boards and to avoid the possibility of hardware damage. For this reason it is proposed to develop a small software tool to check proposed board configurations, guide the user in setting hardware jumpers, drive the software elements of the configuration process and advise whether a board is correctly configured before it is connected to a domain bus.


SCX project homepage

Institut für Neuroinformatik home page