Hardware-Software Co-Design for Kohonen's Self-Organizing Map

Kohonen's self-organizing map (SOM) is a widely used technique to cluster unstructured data. It has applications in computer graphics, image processing, robotics, soft-computing and many more. The exact speci cation and time requirements may vary according to the concrete application, therefore a re-design of Kohonen's SOM o ering several di erent performance/cost trade-o s by using special purpose hardware acceleration would be bene cial. This paper introduces the main principles of systemlevel synthesis (SLS) which aims at constructing optimal hardware-software systems ful lling a high-level speci cation and applies its methodologies to construct di erent hardware-software SOM realizations corresponding to the concrete expectations.