A Pulse-Coded Communications Infrastructure for Neuromorphic Systems

Neuromorphic engineering [Mead, 1989, Mead, 1990, Douglas et al., 1995] applies the computational principles used by biological nervous systems to those tasks that biological systems perform easily, but which have proved difficult to do using traditional engineering techniques. These problems include visual and auditory perceptive processing, navigation, and locomotion. Typically, current neuromorphic systems are hybrid analog-digital electronic systems fabricated using CMOS VLSI technology [Mead, 1989, Douglas and Mahowald, 1995]. Research has focused on the sub-threshold analog operation of these circuits, because in this regime it is possible to construct compact analog circuits that compute various biologically relevant operations such as logarithms, exponents and hyperbolic tangents.