This paper presents a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) implementation of a conscience mechanism used to improve the effectiveness of learning in the winner-takes-all (WTA) artificial neural networks (ANNs) realized at the transistor level. This mechanism makes it possible to eliminate the effect of the so-called ¿dead neurons,¿ which do not take part in the learning phase competition. These neurons usually have a detrimental effect on the network performance, increasing the quantization error. The proposed mechanism comes as part of the analog implementation of the WTA neural networks (NNs) designed for applications to ultralow power portable diagnostic devices for online analysis of ECG biomedical signals. The study presents Matlab simulations of the network's model, discusses postlayout circuit level simulations and includes results of measurement completed for the physical realization of the circuit.

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