Dynamic Power Management for Neuromorphic Many-Core Systems

This work presents a dynamic power management architecture for neuromorphic many core systems such as SpiNNaker. A fast dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) technique is presented which allows the processing elements (PE) to change their supply voltage and clock frequency individually and autonomously within less than 100 ns. This is employed by the neuromorphic simulation software flow, which defines the performance level (PL) of the PE based on the actual workload within each simulation cycle. A test chip in 28 nm SLP CMOS technology has been implemented. It includes 4 PEs which can be scaled from 0.7 V to 1.0 V with frequencies from 125 MHz to 500 MHz at three distinct PLs. By measurement of three neuromorphic benchmarks it is shown that the total PE power consumption can be reduced by 75%, with 80% baseline power reduction and a 50% reduction of energy per neuron and synapse computation, all while maintaining temporary peak system performance to achieve biological real-time operation of the system. A numerical model of this power management model is derived which allows DVFS architecture exploration for neuromorphics. The proposed technique is to be used for the second generation SpiNNaker neuromorphic many core system

A 16-Channel Fully Configurable Neural SoC With 1.52 μW/Ch Signal Acquisition, 2.79 μW/Ch Real-Time Spike Classifier, and 1.79 TOPS/W Deep Neural Network Accelerator in 22 nm FDSOI

With the advent of high-density micro-electrodes arrays, developing neural probes satisfying the real-time and stringent power-efficiency requirements becomes more challenging. A smart neural probe is an essential device in future neuroscientific research and medical applications. To realize such devices, we present a 22 nm FDSOI SoC with complex on-chip real-time data processing and training for neural signal analysis. It consists of a digitally-assisted 16-channel analog front-end with 1.52 μ W/Ch, dedicated bio-processing accelerators for spike detection and classification with 2.79 μ W/Ch, and a 125 MHz RISC-V CPU, utilizing adaptive body biasing at 0.5 V with a supporting 1.79 TOPS/W MAC array. The proposed SoC shows a proof-of-concept of how to realize a high-level integration of various on-chip accelerators to satisfy the neural probe requirements for modern applications

A database accelerator for energy-efficient query processing and optimization

Data processing on a continuously growing amount of information and the increasing power restrictions have become an ubiquitous challenge in our world today. Besides parallel computing, a promising approach to improve the energy efficiency of current systems is to integrate specialized hardware. This paper presents a Tensilica RISC processor extended with an instruction set to accelerate basic database operators frequently used in modern database systems. The core was taped out in a 28 nm SLP CMOS technology and allows energy-efficient query processing as well as query optimization by applying selectivity estimation techniques. Our chip measurements show an 1000x energy improvement on selected database operators compared to state-of-the-art systems