Pipeline AER arbitration with event aging

Paper presented at the 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), held in Baltimore, MD, USA, on 28-31 May 2017. We present a simple circuit to handle communication between cells of neuromorphic arrays. It allows cells to operate continuously without waiting for acknowledgement signals back from the AER (Address Event Representation) arbitration circuitry. The module also implements aging of cell petitions i.e., old petitions to access to the AER bus are automatically discarded to give priority to the more recent ones and alleviate the bus congestion. The new arbitration scheme has been implemented and tested. A particular application scenario with an image sensor with spiking pixels that sense light continuously is explained. Experimental data obtained with real visual scenes are provided