XBioSiP: A Methodology for Approximate Bio-Signal Processing at the Edge

Bio-signals exhibit high redundancy, and the algorithms for their processing are inherently error resilient. This property can be leveraged to improve the energy-efficiency of IoT-Edge (wearables) through the emerging trend of approximate computing. This paper presents XBioSiP, a novel methodology for approximate bio-signal processing that employs two quality evaluation stages, during the pre-processing and bio-signal processing stages, to determine the approximation parameters. It thereby achieves high energy savings while satisfying the user-determined quality constraint. Our methodology achieves, up to 19x and 22x reduction in the energy consumption of a QRS peak detection algorithm for 0% and <1% loss in peak detection accuracy, respectively.Comment: Accepted for publication at the Design Automation Conference 2019 (DAC'19), Las Vegas, Nevada, US

Bit-level pipelined digit-serial array processors

A new architecture for high performance digit-serial vector inner product (VIP) which can be pipelined to the bit-level is introduced. The design of the digit-serial vector inner product is based on a new systematic design methodology using radix-2n arithmetic. The proposed architecture allows a high level of bit-level pipelining to increase the throughput rate with minimum initial delay and minimum area. This will give designers greater flexibility in finding the best tradeoff between hardware cost and throughput rate. It is shown that sub-digit pipelined digit-serial structure can achieve a higher throughput rate with much less area consumption than an equivalent bit-parallel structure. A twin-pipe architecture to double the throughput rate of digit-serial multipliers and consequently that of the digit-serial vector inner product is also presented. The effect of the number of pipelining levels and the twin-pipe architecture on the throughput rate and hardware cost are discussed. A two's complement digit-serial architecture which can operate on both negative and positive numbers is also presented

A wideband linear tunable CDTA and its application in field programmable analogue array

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Hu, Z., Wang, C., Sun, J. et al. ‘A wideband linear tunable CDTA and its application in field programmable analogue array’, Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing, Vol. 88 (3): 465-483, September 2016. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 6 June 2017. The final publication is available at Springer via https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10470-016-0772-7 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016In this paper, a NMOS-based wideband low power and linear tunable transconductance current differencing transconductance amplifier (CDTA) is presented. Based on the NMOS CDTA, a novel simple and easily reconfigurable configurable analogue block (CAB) is designed. Moreover, using the novel CAB, a simple and versatile butterfly-shaped FPAA structure is introduced. The FPAA consists of six identical CABs, and it could realize six order current-mode low pass filter, second order current-mode universal filter, current-mode quadrature oscillator, current-mode multi-phase oscillator and current-mode multiplier for analog signal processing. The Cadence IC Design Tools 5.1.41 post-layout simulation and measurement results are included to confirm the theory.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Indicating Asynchronous Array Multipliers

Multiplication is an important arithmetic operation that is frequently encountered in microprocessing and digital signal processing applications, and multiplication is physically realized using a multiplier. This paper discusses the physical implementation of many indicating asynchronous array multipliers, which are inherently elastic and modular and are robust to timing, process and parametric variations. We consider the physical realization of many indicating asynchronous array multipliers using a 32/28nm CMOS technology. The weak-indication array multipliers comprise strong-indication or weak-indication full adders, and strong-indication 2-input AND functions to realize the partial products. The multipliers were synthesized in a semi-custom ASIC design style using standard library cells including a custom-designed 2-input C-element. 4x4 and 8x8 multiplication operations were considered for the physical implementations. The 4-phase return-to-zero (RTZ) and the 4-phase return-to-one (RTO) handshake protocols were utilized for data communication, and the delay-insensitive dual-rail code was used for data encoding. Among several weak-indication array multipliers, a weak-indication array multiplier utilizing a biased weak-indication full adder and the strong-indication 2-input AND function is found to have reduced cycle time and power-cycle time product with respect to RTZ and RTO handshaking for 4x4 and 8x8 multiplications. Further, the 4-phase RTO handshaking is found to be preferable to the 4-phase RTZ handshaking for achieving enhanced optimizations of the design metrics.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1903.0943