Time-Based Non-Uniform Quantization with Linear-Bias Integrate-and-Fire TEMs

We show that firing intervals in integrate-and-fire TEMs are inherently non-uniformly distributed, rendering uniform quantization (UQ) inefficient. For a class of bandlimited signals, we derive the probability distribution of firing intervals and design a power-law-based non-uniform quantizer (NUQ) tailored to this distribution. Simulation results demonstrate that NUQ sig nificantly outperforms UQ under the same bit budget. We further compare TEMs with non-uniform sampling, where both amplitudes and timings must be quantized, and show that TEM–NUQ achieves lower reconstruction error at half the communication cost.

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