Internet-of-Things devices need sensors with low power footprint and capable of producing semantically rich data. Promising candidates are spiking sensors that use asynchronous Address-Event Representation (AER) carrying information within inter-spike times. To minimize the overhead of coupling AER sensors with off-The-shelf microcontrollers, we propose an FPGA-based methodology that i) tags the AER spikes with timestamps to make them carriable by standard interfaces (e.g. I2S, SPI); ii) uses a recursively divided clock generated on-chip by a pausable ring-oscillator, to reduce power while keeping accuracy above 97% on timestamps. We prototyped our methodology on a IGLOOnano AGLN250 FPGA, consuming less than 4.5mW under a 550kevt/s spike rate (i.e. a noisy environment), and down to 50uW in absence of spikes.
An Ultra-Low Power Address-Event Sensor Interface for Energy-Proportional Time-To-Information Extraction / Di Mauro, Alfio; Conti, Francesco; Benini, Luca. - ELETTRONICO. - 128280:(2017), pp. 75.1-75.6. (Intervento presentato al convegno 54th Annual Design Automation Conference, DAC 2017 tenutosi a usa nel 2017) [10.1145/3061639.3062201].
An Ultra-Low Power Address-Event Sensor Interface for Energy-Proportional Time-To-Information Extraction
Conti, Francesco;Benini, Luca
2017
Abstract
Internet-of-Things devices need sensors with low power footprint and capable of producing semantically rich data. Promising candidates are spiking sensors that use asynchronous Address-Event Representation (AER) carrying information within inter-spike times. To minimize the overhead of coupling AER sensors with off-The-shelf microcontrollers, we propose an FPGA-based methodology that i) tags the AER spikes with timestamps to make them carriable by standard interfaces (e.g. I2S, SPI); ii) uses a recursively divided clock generated on-chip by a pausable ring-oscillator, to reduce power while keeping accuracy above 97% on timestamps. We prototyped our methodology on a IGLOOnano AGLN250 FPGA, consuming less than 4.5mW under a 550kevt/s spike rate (i.e. a noisy environment), and down to 50uW in absence of spikes.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.