In this section, the details of the proposed hardware of the
rational-based K-SOM quantizer are presented. It is noted
that this is only a sample implementation which we used
during experimentations in order to prove our concept. The
hardware can be optimized to further speed-up the overall
performance at the cost of utilizing more hardware components.
The register transfer logic (RTL) diagram of the
innermost components of the SOMCorePE (namely innerSOMPE)
utilizing an operator sharing approach is
shown in Fig. 1. The innerSOMPE has its own set of
operators which make it capable of performing all required
operations to its internal codeword registers. The presented
RTL diagram is for a single colour channel. This means
that to perform quantizing of a colour image which consists
of red, green and blue colour channels on a parallel basis,
there must be three instances of the innerSOMPE
component. The additional required components and their
connections for a complete SOMCorePE is shown in
Fig. 3.