Event-driven neural integration and synchronicity in analog VLSI

Abstract

Synchrony and temporal coding in the central nervous system, as the source of local field potentials and complex neural dynamics, arises from precise timing relationships between spike action population events across neuronal assemblies. Recently it has been shown that coincidence detection based on spike event timing also presents a robust neural code invariant to additive incoherent noise from desynchronized and unrelated inputs. We present spike-based coincidence detection using integrate-and-fire neural membrane dynamics along with pooled conductance-based synaptic dynamics in a hierarchical address-event architecture. Within this architecture, we encode each synaptic event with parameters that govern synaptic connectivity, synaptic strength, and axonal delay with additional global configurable parameters that govern neural and synaptic temporal dynamics. Spike-based coincidence detection is observed and analyzed in measurements on a log-domain analog VLSI implementation of the integrate-and-fire neuron and conductance-based synapse dynamics.