Abstract
This paper presents a heterogeneous microprocessor for low-energy sensor-inference applications. Hardware acceleration has shown to enable substantial energy-efficiency and throughput gains, but raises significant challenges where programmable computations are required, as in the case of feature extraction. To overcome this, a programmable feature-extraction accelerator (FEA) is presented that exploits genetic programming for automatic program synthesis. This leads to approximate, but highly structured, computations, enabling: 1) a high degree of specialization; 2) systematic mapping of programs to the accelerator; and 3) energy scalability via user-controllable approximation knobs. A microprocessor integrating a CPU with feature-extraction and classification accelerators is prototyped in 130-nm CMOS. Two medical-sensor applications (electroencephalogram-based seizure detection and electrocardiogram-based arrhythmia detection) demonstrate 325 × and 156 × energy reduction, respectively, for programmable feature extraction implemented on the accelerator versus a CPU-only architecture, and 7.6 × and 6.5 × energy reduction, respectively, versus a CPU-with-coprocessor architecture. Furthermore, 20 × and 9 × energy scalability, respectively, is demonstrated via the approximation knobs. The energy-efficiency of the programmable FEA is 220 GOPS/W, near that of fixed-function accelerators in the same technology, exceeding typical programmable accelerators.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1016-1027 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits |
Volume | 53 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Apr 2018 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Keywords
- Approximate computation
- feature extraction
- machine learning
- programmable accelerator
- sensor inference