Arnold: An eFPGA-Augmented RISC-V SoC for Flexible and Low-Power IoT End Nodes
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Date
2021-04
Publication Type
Journal Article
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yes
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Abstract
A wide range of Internet of Things (IoT) applications require powerful, energy-efficient, and flexible end nodes to acquire data from multiple sources, process and distill the sensed data through near-sensor data analytics algorithms, and transmit it wirelessly. This work presents Arnold : a 0.5-to-0.8-V, 46.83- μW /MHz, 600-MOPS fully programmable RISC-V microcontroller unit (MCU) fabricated in 22-nm Globalfoundries GF22FDX (GF22FDX) technology, coupled with a state-of-the-art (SoA) microcontroller to an embedded field-programmable gate array (eFPGA). We demonstrate the flexibility of the system-on-chip (SoC) to tackle the challenges of many emerging IoT applications, such as interfacing sensors and accelerators with nonstandard interfaces, performing on-the-fly preprocessing tasks on data streamed from peripherals, and accelerating near-sensor analytics, encryption, and machine learning tasks. A unique feature of the proposed SoC is the exploitation of body-biasing to reduce leakage power of the eFPGA fabric by up to 18× at 0.5 V, achieving SoA state bitstream-retentive sleep power for the eFPGA fabric, as low as 20.5 μW . The proposed SoC provides 3.4× better performance and 2.9× better energy efficiency than other fabricated heterogeneous reconfigurable SoCs of the same class. © 2021 IEEE
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Publication status
published
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Volume
29 (4)
Pages / Article No.
677 - 690
Publisher
IEEE
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Software
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Subject
Edge computing; Embedded systems; Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA); Internet of Things (IoT); Microcontroller; Open source; RISC-V
Organisational unit
03996 - Benini, Luca / Benini, Luca
Notes
Funding
732631 - Open Transprecision Computing (EC)