Timing Recovery and Sequence Detection for Integrate-and-Fire Time Encoding Receivers

Recent advances in neuromorphic signal processing have introduced time encoding machines as a promising alternative to conventional uniform sampling for low-power communication receivers. In this paradigm, analog signals are converted into event timings by an integrate-and-fire circuit, allowing information to be represented through spike times rather than amplitude samples. While event-driven sampling eliminates the need for a fixed-rate clock, receivers equipped with integrate-and-fire time encoding machines, called time encoding receivers, often assume perfect symbol synchronization, leaving the problem of symbol timing recovery unresolved. This paper presents a joint timing recovery and data detection framework for integrate-and-fire time encoding receivers. The log-likelihood function is derived to capture the dependence between firing times, symbol timing offset, and transmitted sequence, leading to a maximum likelihood formulation for joint timing estimation and sequence detection. A practical two-stage receiver is developed, consisting of a timing recovery algorithm followed by a zero-forcing detector. Simulation results demonstrate accurate symbol timing offset estimation and improved symbol error rate performance compared to existing time encoding receivers.