Application specific integrated circuit solution for multi‐input multi‐output piecewise‐affine functions

Summary This paper presents a fully digital architecture and its application specific integrated circuit implementation for computing multi-input multi-output (MIMO) piecewise-affine (PWA) functions. The work considers both PWA functions defined over regular hyperrectangular and simplicial partitions of the input domains and also lattice PWA representations. The proposed architecture is able to implement PWA functions following different realization strategies, using a common structure with a minimized number of blocks, thus reducing power consumption and hardware resources. Experimental results obtained with application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) integrated in a 90-nm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor standard technology are provided. The proposed architecture is compared with other digital architectures in the state of the art habitually used to implement model predictive control applications. The proposal is superior in power consumption (saving up to 86%) and economy of hardware resources (saving up to 40% in comparison with a mere replication of the three representations) to other proposals described in literature, being ready to be used in applications where high-performance and minimum unitary cost are required. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.