Ultra-Low-Power Processors

Society's increasing use of connected sensing and wearable computing has created robust demand for ultra-low-power (ULP) edge computing devices and associated system-on-chip (SoC) architectures. In fact, the ubiquity of ULP processing has already made such embedded devices the highest-volume processor part in production, with an even greater dominance expected in the near future. The Internet of Everything calls for an embedded processor in every object, necessitating billions or trillions of processors. At the same time, the explosion of data generated from these devices, in conjunction with the traditional model of using cloud-based services to process the data, will place tremendous demands on limited wireless spectrum and energy-hungry wireless networks. Smart, ULP edge devices are the only viable option that can meet these demands

Scalable Hierarchical Instruction Cache for Ultra-Low-Power Processors Clusters

High Performance and Energy Efficiency are critical requirements for Internet of Things (IoT) end-nodes. Exploiting tightly-coupled clusters of programmable processors (CMPs) has recently emerged as a suitable solution to address this challenge. One of the main bottlenecks limiting the performance and energy efficiency of these systems is the instruction cache architecture due to its criticality in terms of timing (i.e., maximum operating frequency), bandwidth, and power. We propose a hierarchical instruction cache tailored to ultra-low-power tightly-coupled processor clusters where a relatively large cache (L1.5) is shared by L1 private caches through a two-cycle latency interconnect. To address the performance loss caused by the L1 capacity misses, we introduce a next-line prefetcher with cache probe filtering (CPF) from L1 to L1.5. We optimize the core instruction fetch (IF) stage by removing the critical core-to-L1 combinational path. We present a detailed comparison of instruction cache architectures' performance and energy efficiency for parallel ultra-low-power (ULP) clusters. Focusing on the implementation, our two-level instruction cache provides better scalability than existing shared caches, delivering up to 20\% higher operating frequency. On average, the proposed two-level cache improves maximum performance by up to 17\% compared to the state-of-the-art while delivering similar energy efficiency for most relevant applications.Comment: 14 page

Dependable design for low-cost ultra-low-power processors

Emerging applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, such as wearables, implantables, smart tags, and wireless sensor networks put severe power, cost, reliability, and security constraints on hardware system design. This dissertation focuses on the architecture and design of dependable ultra-low power computing systems. Specifically, it proposes architecture and design techniques that exploit the unique application and usage characteristics of future computing systems to deliver low power, while meeting the reliability and security constraints of these systems. First, this dissertation considers the challenge of achieving both low power and high reliability in SRAM memories. It proposes both an architectural technique to reduce the overheads of error correction and a technique that uses the nature of error correcting codes to allow lower voltage operation without sacrificing reliability. Next, this dissertation considers low power and low cost. By leveraging the fact that many IoT systems are embedded in nature and will run the same application for their entire lifetime, fine-grained usage characteristics of the hardware-software system can be determined at design time. This dissertation presents a novel hardware-software co-analysis based on symbolic simulation that can determine the possible states of the processor throughout any execution of a specific application. This enables power-gating where more gates are turned off for longer, bespoke processors customized to specific applications, and stricter determination of peak power bounds. Finally, this dissertation considers achieving secure IoT systems at low cost and power overhead. By leveraging the hardware-software co-analysis, this dissertation shows that gate-level information flow security guarantees can be provided without hardware overheads

TinyVers: A Tiny Versatile System-on-chip with State-Retentive eMRAM for ML Inference at the Extreme Edge

Extreme edge devices or Internet-of-thing nodes require both ultra-low power always-on processing as well as the ability to do on-demand sampling and processing. Moreover, support for IoT applications like voice recognition, machine monitoring, etc., requires the ability to execute a wide range of ML workloads. This brings challenges in hardware design to build flexible processors operating in ultra-low power regime. This paper presents TinyVers, a tiny versatile ultra-low power ML system-on-chip to enable enhanced intelligence at the Extreme Edge. TinyVers exploits dataflow reconfiguration to enable multi-modal support and aggressive on-chip power management for duty-cycling to enable smart sensing applications. The SoC combines a RISC-V host processor, a 17 TOPS/W dataflow reconfigurable ML accelerator, a 1.7 $\mu$W deep sleep wake-up controller, and an eMRAM for boot code and ML parameter retention. The SoC can perform up to 17.6 GOPS while achieving a power consumption range from 1.7 $\mu$W-20 mW. Multiple ML workloads aimed for diverse applications are mapped on the SoC to showcase its flexibility and efficiency. All the models achieve 1-2 TOPS/W of energy efficiency with power consumption below 230 $\mu$W in continuous operation. In a duty-cycling use case for machine monitoring, this power is reduced to below 10 $\mu$W.Comment: Accepted in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuit

Instruction prefetching techniques for ultra low-power multicore architectures

As the gap between processor and memory speeds increases, memory latencies have become a critical bottleneck for computing performance. To reduce this bottleneck, designers have been working on techniques to hide these latencies. On the other hand, design of embedded processors typically targets low cost and low power consumption. Therefore, techniques which can satisfy these constraints are more desirable for embedded domains. While out-of-order execution, aggressive speculation, and complex branch prediction algorithms can help hide the memory access latency in high-performance systems, yet they can cost a heavy power budget and are not suitable for embedded systems. Prefetching is another popular method for hiding the memory access latency, and has been studied very well for high-performance processors. Similarly, for embedded processors with strict power requirements, the application of complex prefetching techniques is greatly limited, and therefore, a low power/energy solution is mostly desired in this context. In this work, we focus on instruction prefetching for ultra-low power processing architectures and aim to reduce energy overhead of this operation by proposing a combination of simple, low-cost, and energy efficient prefetching techniques. We study a wide range of applications from cryptography to computer vision and show that our proposed mechanisms can effectively improve the hit-rate of almost all of them to above 95%, achieving an average performance improvement of more than 2X. Plus, by synthesizing our designs using the state-of-the-art technologies we show that the prefetchers increase system’s power consumption less than 15% and total silicon area by less than 1%. Altogether, a total energy reduction of 1.9X is achieved, thanks to the proposed schemes, enabling a significantly higher battery life

On the parallelization of a three-parametric log-logistic estimation algorithm

Networked telerobots transmit data from its sensors to the remote controller. To provide guarantees on the time requirements of these systems it is mandatory to keep the transmission time delays below a given threshold, and to that end we should predict them. In this paper we tackle the parallelization of a procedure that models these stochastic time delays. More precisely, we focus on fitting the time delay signal using a three-parametrical log-logistic distribution. Since, the robot and the controller are powered by multicore processors and, mainly on the robot, the energy consumption is a relevant issue, we study different alternatives to optimize both performance and energy usage of the aforesaid algorithm. Two quad-core processors are considered: a low power Intel Core i7 (45W TDP) and a ultra low power Samsung Exynos 5 (6W TDP). Results show that parallelism is beneficial, but that not all the cores should be exploited if the system is targeted at optimizing a performance-energy tradeoff.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

PULP-NN: Accelerating Quantized Neural Networks on Parallel Ultra-Low-Power RISC-V Processors

We present PULP-NN, an optimized computing library for a parallel ultra-low-power tightly coupled cluster of RISC-V processors. The key innovation in PULP-NN is a set of kernels for quantized neural network inference, targeting byte and sub-byte data types, down to INT-1, tuned for the recent trend toward aggressive quantization in deep neural network inference. The proposed library exploits both the digital signal processing extensions available in the PULP RISC-V processors and the cluster\u2019s parallelism, achieving up to 15.5 MACs/cycle on INT-8 and improving performance by up to 63 7 with respect to a sequential implementation on a single RISC-V core implementing the baseline RV32IMC ISA. Using PULP-NN, a CIFAR-10 network on an octa-core cluster runs in 30 7 and 19.6 7 less clock cycles than the current state-of-the-art ARM CMSIS-NN library, running on STM32L4 and STM32H7 MCUs, respectively. The proposed library, when running on a GAP-8 processor, outperforms by 36.8 7 and by 7.45 7 the execution on energy efficient MCUs such as STM32L4 and high-end MCUs such as STM32H7 respectively, when operating at the maximum frequency. The energy efficiency on GAP-8 is 14.1 7 higher than STM32L4 and 39.5 7 higher than STM32H7, at the maximum efficiency operating point. This article is part of the theme issue \u2018Harmonizing energy-autonomous computing and intelligence\u2019