Spike-based acoustic signal processing chips for detection and localization

Abstract

Voltage spikes are ubiquitous in biological nervous systems. How spikes can be used to encode signals, facilitate communication, and implement important computations is an important question of contemporary neuroscience. Acoustic processing tasks provide a rich range of applications for this encoding scheme. As a summary of the Ph.D. research of the first author, we present two analog VLSI spike-based example systems that process acoustic information using spikes: a model of the neural signal processing involved in bat echolocation, and a low-power, time-domain acoustic periodicity detector.