Tools for Address-Event-Representation Communication Systems and Debugging

Address-Event-Representation (AER) is a communications protocol for transferring spikes between bio-inspired chips. Such systems may consist of a hierarchical structure with several chips that transmit spikes among them in real time, while performing some processing. To develop and test AER based systems it is convenient to have a set of instruments that would allow to: generate AER streams, monitor the output produced by neural chips and modify the spike stream produced by an emitting chip to adapt it to the requirements of the receiving elements. In this paper we present a set of tools that implement these functions developed in the CAVIAR EU project.