An Energy Efficient Full-Frame Feature Extraction Accelerator With Shift-Latch FIFO in 28 nm CMOS

作者：Jeon Dongsuk^*; Henry Michael B; Kim Yejoong; Lee Inhee; Zhang Zhengya; Blaauw David; Sylvester Dennis

来源：IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 2014, 49(5): 1271-1284.

DOI：10.1109/JSSC.2014.2309692

• Energy efficient DSP
• feature extraction
• first-in first-out
• near-threshold design
• pipeline

This paper presents an energy-efficient feature extraction accelerator design aimed at visual navigation. The hardware-oriented algorithmic modifications such as a circular-shaped sampling region and unified description are proposed to minimize area and energy consumption while maintaining feature extraction quality. A matched-throughput accelerator employs fully-unrolled filters and single-stream descriptor enabled by algorithm-architecture co-optimization, which requires lower clock frequency for the given throughput requirement and reduces hardware cost of description processing elements. Due to the large number of FIFO blocks, a robust low-power FIFO architecture for the ultra-low voltage (ULV) regime is also proposed. This approach leverages shift-latch delay elements and balanced-leakage readout technique to achieve 62% energy savings and 37% delay reduction. We apply these techniques to a feature extraction accelerator that can process 30 fps VGA video in real time and is fabricated in 28 nm LP CMOS technology. The design consumes 2.7 mW with a clock frequency of 27 MHz at V-dd = 470 mV, providing 3.5x better energy efficiency than previous state-of-the-art while extracting features from entire image.

• 出版日期2014-5