Copyright © 2009 Yingwei Li and Huaiqin Wu. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper considers a new class of additive neural networks where the neuron activations are modelled by discontinuous functions with nonlinear growth. By Leray-Schauder alternative theorem in differential inclusion theory, matrix theory, and generalized Lyapunov approach, a general result is derived which ensures the existence and global asymptotical stability of a unique periodic solution for such neural networks. The obtained results can be applied to neural networks with a broad range of activation functions assuming neither boundedness nor monotonicity, and also show that Forti's conjecture for discontinuous neural networks with nonlinear growth activations is true.