HyCUBE: A 0.9V 26.4 MOPS/mW, 290 pJ/op, Power Efficient Accelerator for IoT Applications
Bo Wang, Manupa Karunarathne, Aditi Kulkarni, Tulika Mitra, Li-Shiuan Peh · 2019
IoT devices use ultra-low-power micro-controllers that cannot handle the performance demands of emerging compute-intensive applications. Accelerators can be added to improve system power-performance efficiency. We present HyCUBE, a Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA) accelerator chip that realizes 127× improvement in power efficiency compared to TI Sensortag IoT platform. HyCUBE has a buffer-less Network-on-Chip (NoC), enabling single-cycle data traversal to boost throughput and a software-scheduled architecture, automatically extracting application parallelism. Our 40nm test chip delivers peak efficiency of 26.4 MOPS/mW with 290 pJ/operation, realizing a power efficiency improvement of 28.6× and 26.5× compared to Xilinx Zynq FPGA and ARM Cortex-A7 core.