Neuromorphic Analog Communication

A recurring topic concerning neural nets implemented in VLSI is chip-to-chip and chip-to-computer communication. One common approach is the asynchronous event protocol, where an asynchronous digital bus is transferring neural spikess as events. Since neural circuits are spiking randomly, a collision strategy must be adopted preserving the statistical properties of the neural representation. This paper describes the methodology and theory behind an approach preserving and taking advantage of the statistical properties of the pulses. It describes a bus encoding scheme with 100% collision detection and a proposed implementation of a simple arbitration circuit implemented with event aging and a CSMA collision strategy. Some simulation results are included.