A 101.4 GOPS/W Reconfigurable and Scalable Control-centric Embedded Processor for Domain-specific Applications

• Increasing the energy efficiency and performance while providing the customizability and scalability is vital for embedded processors adapting to domain-specific applications such as Internet of Things. In this paper, we proposed a reconfigurable and scalable control-centric architecture, and implemented the design consisting of two cores and an on-chip multi-mode router in 65 nm technology. The reconfigurability is enabled by the restructurable sequence mapping table (SMT) thus the reorganizable functional units. Owing to the integration of the multi-mode router, on-chip or inter-chip network for multi-/many-core computing can be composed for performance extension on demand even in the post-fabrication stage. Control-centric design simplifies the control logic, shrinks the non-functional units and orchestrates the operations to increase the hard are utilization and reduce the excessive data movement for high energy efficiency. As a result, the processor can both conduct general-purpose processing with 29% smaller code size and application-specific processing with over 10 times performance improvement when implementing AES by SMT. The dual-core processor consumes 19.7 μW/MHz with die size of 3.5 mm2. The achieved energy efficiency is 101.4GOPS/W.

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