ECHOES: a 200 GOPS/W Frequency Domain SoC with FFT Processor and I²S DSP for Flexible Data Acquisition from Microphone Arrays
Abstract
Emerging applications in the IoT domain require ultra-low-power and high-performance end-nodes to deal with complex near-sensor-data analytics. Domains such as audio, radar, and Structural Health Monitoring require many computations to be performed in the frequency domain rather than in the time domain. We present Echoes, a System-On-a-Chip (SoC) composed of a RISC-V core enhanced with fixed- and floating-point digital signal processing (DSP) extensions and a Fast-Fourier Transform (FFT) hardware accelerator targeting emerging frequency-domain application. The proposed SoC features an autonomous I/O engine supporting a wide set of peripherals, including Ultra-Low-Power radars, MEMS, and digital microphones over I 2 S protocol with full-duplex Time Division Multiplexing DSP mode, making Echoes the first open-source SoC which offers this functionality enabling simultaneous communication with up to 16 I/Os devices. Echoes, fabricated with 65nm CMOS technology, reaches a peak performance of 0.16 GFLOPS and a peak energy efficiency of 9.68 GFLOPS/W on a wide range of floating and fixed-point general-purpose DSP kernels. The FFT accelerator achieves performance up to 10.16 GOPS with an efficiency of 199.8 GOPS/W, improving performance and efficiency by up to 41.1× and 11.2×, respectively, over its software implementation of this critical task for frequency domain processing. Show more
Publication status
publishedExternal links
Book title
IEEE ISCAS 2023 Symposium ProceedingsPublisher
IEEEEvent
Subject
Frequency Domain SoC; FFT processor; I²S; TDM; microphone arrayOrganisational unit
03996 - Benini, Luca / Benini, Luca
Funding
877056 - A Cognitive Fractal and Secure EDGE based on an unique Open-Safe-Reliable-Low Power Hardware Platform Node (EC)
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