| |
Nabil Imam and Rajit Manohar
We present a novel Address-Event Representation (AER)
transmitter circuit to communicate pulses of neural activity (spikes)
within a neuromorphic system. AER circuits allow an ensemble of
neurons to achieve large scale time-multiplexed connectivity through a
shared communication channel. Our design makes use of token-ring
mutual exclusion where two circulating tokens in a 2D array of neurons
provide exclusive access to the shared channel. Compared to
traditional arbitration-tree-based designs, our design has a higher
throughput and lower latency during high spiking activity. This allows the circuit to serve larger neuronal densities and higher spiking activity while maintaining the temporal precision required by the system. Our design also eliminates the address
line loads that restricted scalability in previous designs. In
addition, our simpler circuit topology leads to area and power savings.
|
|
