Vega: A Ten-Core SoC for IoT Endnodes With DNN Acceleration and Cognitive Wake-Up From MRAM-Based State-Retentive Sleep Mode

Davide Rossi, Francesco Conti, Manuel Eggimann, Alfio Di Mauro, Giuseppe Tagliavini, Stefan Mach, Marco Guermandi, Antonio Pullini, Igor Loi, Jie Chen, Eric Flamand, Luca Benini
2021 IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits  
The Internet-of-Things requires end-nodes with ultra-low-power always-on capability for a long battery lifetime, as well as high performance, energy efficiency, and extreme flexibility to deal with complex and fast-evolving near-sensor analytics algorithms (NSAAs). We present Vega, an IoT end-node SoC capable of scaling from a 1.7 μW fully retentive cognitive sleep mode up to 32.2 GOPS (@ 49.4 mW) peak performance on NSAAs, including mobile DNN inference, exploiting 1.6 MB of state-retentive
more » ... M, and 4 MB of non-volatile MRAM. To meet the performance and flexibility requirements of NSAAs, the SoC features 10 RISC-V cores: one core for SoC and IO management and a 9-cores cluster supporting multi-precision SIMD integer and floating-point computation. Vega achieves SoA-leading efficiency of 615 GOPS/W on 8-bit INT computation (boosted to 1.3TOPS/W for 8-bit DNN inference with hardware acceleration). On floating-point (FP) compuation, it achieves SoA-leading efficiency of 79 and 129 GFLOPS/W on 32- and 16-bit FP, respectively. Two programmable machine-learning (ML) accelerators boost energy efficiency in cognitive sleep and active states, respectively.
doi:10.1109/jssc.2021.3114881 fatcat:mnu3j7pw2ffhbhbjhnqnqutogq