We present a neuromorphic Analogue-to-Digital Converter (ADC), which uses
integrate-and-fire (I&F) neurons as the encoders of the analogue signal, with
modulated inhibitions to decohere the neuronal spikes trains. The architecture
consists of an analogue chip and a control module. The analogue chip comprises
two scan chains and a twodimensional integrate-and-fire neuronal array.
Individual neurons are accessed via the chains one by one without any encoder
decoder or arbiter. The control module is implemented on an FPGA (Field
Programmable Gate Array), which sends scan enable signals to the scan chains
and controls the inhibition for individual neurons. Since the control module is
implemented on an FPGA, it can be easily reconfigured. Additionally, we propose
a pulse width modulation methodology for the lateral inhibition, which makes
use of different pulse widths indicating different strengths of inhibition for
each individual neuron to decohere neuronal spikes. Software simulations in
this paper tested the robustness of the proposed ADC architecture to fixed
random noise. A circuit simulation using ten neurons shows the performance and
the feasibility of the architecture.Comment: BioCAS-201
