Emerging data-driven applications in the embedded, e-Health, and internet of things (IoT) domain require complex on-device signal analysis and data reduction to maximize energy efficiency on these energy-constrained devices. Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) have been proposed as a good compromise between flexibility and energy efficiency for ultra-low power (ULP) signal processing. Existing CGRAs are often specialized and domain-specific or can only accelerate simple kernels, which makes accelerating complete applications on a CGRA while maintaining high energy efficiency an open issue. Moreover, the lack of instruction set architecture (ISA) standardization across CGRAs makes code generation using current compiler technology a major challenge. This work introduces R-Blocks; a ULP CGRA with HW/SW co-design tool-flow based on the OpenASIP toolset. This CGRA is extremely flexible due to its well-established VLIW-SIMD execution model and support for flexible SIMD-processing, while maintaining an extremely high energy efficiency using software bypassing, optimized instruction delivery, and local scratchpad memories. R-Blocks is synthesized in a commercial 22-nm FD-SOI technology and achieves a full-system energy efficiency of 115 MOPS/mW on a common FFT benchmark, 1.45× higher than a highly tuned embedded RISC-V processor. Comparable energy efficiency is obtained on multiple complex workloads, making R-Blocks a promising acceleration target for general-purpose computing.

With the rise of deep learning (DL), our world braces for artificial intelligence (AI) in every edge device, creating an urgent need for edge-AI SoCs. This SoC hardware needs to support high throughput, reliable and secure AI processing at ultra-low power (ULP), with a very short time to market. With its strong legacy in edge solutions and open processing platforms, the EU is well-positioned to become a leader in this SoC market. However, this requires AI edge processing to become at least 100 times more energy-efficient, while offering sufficient flexibility and scalability to deal with AI as a fast-moving target. Since the design space of these complex SoCs is huge, advanced tooling is needed to make their design tractable. The CONVOLVE project (currently in Inital stage) addresses these roadblocks. It takes a holistic approach with innovations at all levels of the design hierarchy. Starting with an overview of SOTA DL processing support and our project methodology, this paper presents 8 important design choices largely impacting the energy efficiency and flexibility of DL hardware. Finding good solutions is key to making smart-edge computing a reality.

Exposed Datapath Architectures (EDPAs) with aggressively pruned data-path connectivity, where not all function units in the design have connections to a centralized register file, are promising solutions for energy-efficient computation. A direct bypassing of data between function units without temporary copies to the register file is a prime optimization for programming such architectures. However, traditional compiler frameworks, such as LLVM, assume function-units connect to register-files and allocate all live variables in register-files. This leads to schedule inefficiencies in terms of instruction-level parallelism and reg-ister accesses in the EDPAs. To address these inefficiencies, we propose Prebypass; a new optimization pass for EDPA compiler backends. Experimental results on an EDPA class of architecture, Transport- Triggered Architecture, show that Prebypass improves the runtime, register reads, and register writes up to 16%, 26 %, and 37 % respectively, when the datapath is extremely pruned. Evaluation in a 28-nm FDSOI technology reveals that Prebypass improves the core-level Energy by 17.5 % over the current heuristic scheduler.

Integrated circuits operating in the near/subthreshold region offer low energy consumption. However, due to the constrained voltage scalability of SRAMs, efficient power delivery is difficult to achieve. A traditional implementation would require at least two distinct voltage supplies generated by possibly two power converters. In this article, a new implementation for near/subthreshold operation is presented. The proposed implementation consists of a new “converter-free” design based on a three-level voltage stack operating at 1.8 V ± 5%. Here, the leakage current from the SRAMs in the top stack is recycled to sustain the near/subthreshold operation of the logic circuits in the two lower stacks. A test chip with the proposed voltage-stacking technique was implemented in a 28-nm low- Vth (LVT) fully depleted silicon on insulator (FDSOI) technology. The test chip is an ultralow-power advanced system-on-chip (SoC) consisting of an RISC-V core, a coarse-grained reconfigurable accelerator, and peripherals. The SoC uses a current sink and an adaptive body-bias controller for voltage regulation of the intermediate voltage rails between the stacks. The proposed system achieves up to 95% power delivery efficiency with negligible area overhead (~ 1%). The silicon measurement shows that the system energy efficiency is improved by 1.6× on average, and the energy consumption is reduced by 37% on average compared to the flat implementation.

This paper presents the design and evaluation of an energy-efficient seizure detection system for emerging EEG-based monitoring applications, such as non-convulsive epileptic seizure detection and Freezing-of-Gait (FoG) detection. As part of the BrainWave system, a BrainWave processor for flexible and energy-efficient signal processing is designed. The key system design parameters, including algorithmic optimizations, feature offloading and near-threshold computing are evaluated in this work. The BrainWave processor is evaluated while executing a complex EEG-based epileptic seizure detection algorithm. In a 28-nm FDSOI technology, 325 μJ per classification at 0.9 V and 290 μJ at 0.5 V are achieved using an optimized software-only implementation. By leveraging a Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA), 160 μJ and 135 μJ are obtained, respectively, while maintaining a high level of flexibility. Near-threshold computing combined with CGRA acceleration leads to an energy reduction of up to 59%, or 55% including idle-time overhead.

Artificial Neural Networks (NNs) can effectively be used to solve many classification and regression problems, and deliver state-of-the-art performance in the application domains of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). However, the tremendous amount of data movement and excessive convolutional workload of these networks hampers large-scale mobile and embedded productization. Therefore these models are generally mapped to energy-efficient accelerators without floating-point support. Weight and data quantization is an effective way to deploy high-precision models to efficient integer-based platforms. In this paper a quantization method for platforms without wide accumulation registers is being proposed. Two constraints to maximize the bit width of weights and input data for a given accumulator size are introduced. These constraints exploit knowledge about the weight and data distribution of individual layers. Using these constraints, we propose a layer-wise quantization heuristic to find a good fixed-point network approximation. To reduce the number of configurations to consider, only solutions that fully utilize the available accumulator bits are being tested. We demonstrate that 16-bit accumulators are able to obtain a Top-1 classification accuracy within 1% of the floating-point baselines on the CIFAR-10 and ILSVRC2012 image classification benchmarks.