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Event-based sensors have the potential to optimize energy consumption at every stage in the signal processing pipeline, including data acquisition, transmission, processing, and storage. However, almost all state-of-the-art systems are still built upon the classical Nyquist-based periodic signal acquisition. In this work, we design and validate the Polygonal Approximation Sampler (PAS), a novel circuit to implement a general-purpose event-based sampler using a polygonal approximation algorithm as the underlying sampling trigger. The circuit can be dynamically reconfigured to produce either a coarse or detailed reconstruction of the analog input by adjusting the error threshold of the approximation. The proposed circuit is designed at the Register Transfer Level and processes each input sample received from the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in a single clock cycle. The PAS has been tested with three different …