There is an emerging philosophy, called Neuro-informatics, contained
in the Artificial Intelligence field, that aims to emulate how living beings do tasks
such as taking a decision based on the interpretation of an image by emulating spiking
neurons into VLSI designs and, therefore, trying to re-create the human brain at
its highest level. Address-Event-Representation (AER) is a communication protocol
that has embedded part of the processing. It is intended to transfer spikes between
bioinspired chips. An AER based system may consist of a hierarchical structure with
several chips that transmit spikes among them in real-time, while performing some
processing. There are several AER tools to help to develop and test AER based systems.
These tools require the use of a computer to allow the higher level processing of
the event information, reaching very high bandwidth at the AER communication level.
We propose the use of an embedded platform based on a multi-task operating system
to allow both, the AER communication and processing without the requirement of either
a laptop or a computer. In this paper, we present and study the performance of a
new philosophy of a frame-grabber AER tool based on a multi-task environment. This
embedded platform is based on the Intel XScale processor which is governed by an
embedded GNU/Linux system. We have connected and programmed it for processing
Address-Event information from a spiking generator.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TEC2006-11730-C03-0
