Address-event representation (AER)

AER is the asynchronous communication protocol that neuromorphic chips use to move spikes: when a neuron fires, its address (identity) is placed on a shared digital bus as an event, and time itself encodes when the spike happened (the event's arrival is its timestamp). It multiplexes many sparse channels onto few wires efficiently, because bandwidth is spent only on actual spikes, and it is the lingua franca linking event sensors, routers, and neuromorphic cores.

AER scales gracefully only while traffic stays sparse; synchronous bursts cause bus contention and require arbitration, adding latency and jitter. Designing the arbitration and routing fabric is a central problem in scaling neuromorphic hardware to many channels.