TickTockTokens: a minimal building block for event-driven systems

Event-driven computing is a key feature of many neuromorphic circuits, yet we lack a common general purpose language to describe such systems, reason about their capabilities, and design them by deliberately composing smaller parts. In this paper, I want to ask: what is the equivalent of a logic gate for event-driven systems? I propose one very simple candidate and show how it can be composed into arbitrarily complex event-driven systems using a framework I call TickTockTokens. I motivate its design, discuss its capabilities, and share a hardware implementation as a very compact digital circuit.