The integrate-and-fire sampler: A special type of asynchronous Σ - Δ modulator

We present the integrate-and-fire (IF) model as a time encoding scheme and show that it corresponds to a special case of the asynchronous Σ-Δ modulator (ASDM). We depart from typical rate based encoding used by conventional ASDM towards time based encoding. We show that for certain families of signals, such as neural recordings, the IF sampler accurately encodes the regions of interest at sub-Nyquist data rates. Nevertheless, the encoder requires nonlinear recovery algorithms, instead of the typical low pass filter.