A scalable event-driven spatiotemporal feature extraction circuit

TL;DR

This paper presents a new CMOS implementation of a scalable, robust event-driven processing circuit called TDE, enabling efficient real-time spatiotemporal feature extraction from high-rate event data.

Contribution

The work introduces a novel CMOS-based TDE circuit that is robust to device mismatch and supports linear integration, facilitating high-density, real-time processing of event-driven sensor data.

Findings

Robust CMOS TDE circuit design

Supports high-density integration on a single die

Enables real-time processing of high-event-rate data

Abstract

Event-driven sensors, which produce data only when there is a change in the input signal, are increasingly used in applications that require low-latency and low-power real-time sensing, such as robotics and edge devices. To fully achieve the latency and power advantages on offer however, similarly event-driven data processing methods are required. A promising solution is the TDE: an event-based processing element which encodes the time difference between events on different channels into an output event stream. In this work we introduce a novel TDE implementation on CMOS. The circuit is robust to device mismatch and allows the linear integration of input events. This is crucial for enabling a high-density implementation of many TDEs on the same die, and for realising real-time parallel processing of the high-event-rate data produced by event-driven sensors.