Abstract: The present disclosure describes systems and methods for operating an event-driven spiking neural network. The neural network is based on a pipelined comparator tree used to find the next neuron to fire (as per the event-driven simulation strategy), with each neuron having a firing time associated therewith. The neuron's discharge is then processed by updating the post-synaptic neurons affected by the firing event. The architecture can be duplicated or otherwise scaled to increase the performance of the system.