Hartung-Gorre Verlag
Inh.: Dr.
Renate Gorre D-78465
Konstanz Fon: +49 (0)7533 97227 Fax: +49 (0)7533 97228 www.hartung-gorre.de
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Series in
Microelectronics
edited by
Luca Benini,
Qiuting
Huang,
Taekwang Jang,
Mathieu
Luisier,
Christoph
Studer,
Hua Wang
Florian Stefan Glaser
An Event-Driven
Parallel-Processing Subsystem
for Energy-Efficient
Mobile Medical Instrumentation
1st Edition 2022. XIV, 200 pages. € 64,00.
ISBN 978-3-86628-777-8
Abstract:
Aging population and the thereby ever-rising cost of
health services call for novel and innovative solutions for providing medical
care and services. So far, medical care is primarily provided in the form of time-consuming
in-person appointments with trained personnel and expensive, stationary
instrumentation equipment. As for many current and past challenges, the
advances in microelectronics are a crucial enabler and offer a plethora of
opportunities. With key building blocks such as sensing, processing, and
communication systems and circuits getting smaller, cheaper, and more
energy-efficient, personal and wearable or even implantable point-of-care
devices with medicalgrade instrumentation capabilities
become feasible. Device size and battery lifetime are paramount for the
realization of such devices. Besides integrating the required functionality
into as few individual microelectronic components as possible, the energy
efficiency of such is crucial to reduce battery size, usually being the
dominant contributor to overall device size.
In this thesis, we present two major contributions to
achieve the discussed goals in the context of miniaturized medical
instrumentation: First, we present a synchronization solution for embedded,
parallel near-threshold computing (NTC), a promising concept for enabling the required
processing capabilities with an energy efficiency that is suitable for highly
mobile devices with very limited battery capacity. Our proposed solution aims
at increasing energy efficiency and performance for parallel NTC clusters by
maximizing the effective utilization of the available cores under parallel
workloads. We describe a hardware unit that enables fine-grain parallelization
by greatly optimizing and accelerating core-to-core synchronization and
communication and analyze the impact of those mechanisms on the overall
performance and energy efficiency of an eight-core cluster. With a range of
digital signal processing (DSP) applications typical for the targeted systems,
the proposed hardware unit improves performance by up to 92% and 23% on average
and energy efficiency by up to 98% and 39% on average.
In the second part, we present a MCU processing and
control subsystem (MPCS) for the integration into VivoSoC,
a highly versatile single-chip solution for mobile medical instrumentation. In
addition to the MPCS, it includes a multitude of analog front-ends (AFEs) and a
multi-channel power management IC (PMIC) for voltage conversion. The MPCS is
comprised of a highly capable single-core control and peripheral MCU subsystem
and a quad-core cluster which achieves a peak energy efficiency of 31GOPS/W at
0.48V and also features our synchronization solution. We extend the single-core
MCU subsystem with a range of application-specific hardware units that –
together with a sophisticated event-based power management scheme – allows the subsystem
to operate in a wide range of low power modes. We achieve autonomous AFE
readout, buffering, and light processing operation without the interaction of
any core at 25.3 μW and a standby power consumption
of less than 10 μW with 16 kB of retentive
memory. On the other end of the spectrum of power modes, all cores of the MPCS combined
achieve a peak performance of 581MOPS
Keywords:
About the Author:
Florian Stefan Glaser was born on the 25th of October,
1990, in Stuttgart, Germany. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in
electrical engineering and information technology from the Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland, in 2013 and 2015, respectively. Mr.
Glaser successively joined the research group of Prof. Dr. Qiuting
Huang at the Integrated Systems Laboratory (IIS) at ETH Zurich as a Ph.D.
candidate. His research interests include near-threshold embedded
multiprocessors and, more specifically, the energy-efficient synchronization of
such. He furthermore works on low power, energy-efficient processing and
control for a highly integrated platform for mobile medical instrumentation.
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